SPOT COLOR PRINTING:

The printing process where only a few, select colors are printed. At Drive Marketing, we typically refer to a universal color matching system called the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM when dertermining the color. The colors are generally more intense and you can get better color fill than with 4 color process, but you are limited to only a few colors.

HALF TONE:

Half tone is the term used in printing for the ability to make different shades of a color through the use of small dots.

GRADIENT:

In printing, a gradient is an area that goes from one color to another color or from one value to a different value of the same color. In printing, this is typically achieved by the use of half tones.

4 COLOR PROCESS:

The printing process where 4 colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) are mixed by using small dots to create an almost full color range.

FILE EXTENSIONS:

When working with art in a digital format, there are two main file types to work with.These two file types are VECTOR GRAPHICS and RASTER GRAPHICS.

VECTOR GRAPHICS:

images that are created using points, lines and curves.
This allows the file to be resized without any loss of quality. Vector graphics have the luxury of having colors that are easily edited. Typical file extensions used when savinig a VECTOR file are eps, ai, crd, svg and in some cases pdf. Occassionally a raster file is re-saved with one of the above extensions, but that doesn't change what kind of file it is.

RASTER GRAPHICS:

images that are made up of a collection of pixels. These files do not have the ability to be resized without loss of quality.
Photographs are saved as RASTER graphics and can be edited in programs like PHOTOSHOP, but this is not the ideal file type for most decoration processes. Typical file extensions used for RASTER graphics are jpg, tif, psd, bmp, png and pdf.

COMPRESSION:

When is file is sent via e.mail or over an ftp site, it can be compressed to reduce the chances of corruption. Files are also compressed to get the size of file down, so it doesn't take as much space or time in transferring.
The most common file extensions seen for compression are .zip, sit and sitx.
A free program for decompressing files can found here:

mac osx

http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander/index.html

windows

http://www.stuffit.com/win/expander/