What’s new from the Recognition stables

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of information your connection to the Internet can carry. On average, typical telephone lines can carry 1K of information per second.

Banner
A banner is a graphic image (static, animated or rich media that is placed on web sites as an advertisement. Banners are commonly used for brand awareness and generating sales.

Bevel
Adding a beveled effect to a graphic image gives the image a raised appearance by applying highlight colors and shadow colors to the inside and outside edges.

bitmap
A graphic imange which is composed of a pattern of dots. The individual dots are stored as data on a computer. An example of an animation that is a bitmap graphic is a GIF animation.

bmp
A graphic image stored as a specific arrangement of screen dots, or pixels. Web graphics are bitmap images. A graphic which is defined by specifying the colors of dots or pixels which make up the picture. Also known as raster graphics. Common types of bitmap graphics are GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, PCX, TIFF, Macintosh Paint, Microsoft Paint, PNG, FAX formats, and TGA.

Bleed or Bleeding Edge
When a page or a cover design extends to and off the edge of the paper it is called a “bleed”. In print design, the artwork or block of color must extend off the edge of the page. The artwork or block of color is then printed on larger-size paper. Then the printed page is trimmed to the desired size. (add an illustration)

Bookmark
Just as a paper bookmark is used as a reminder of the page you are on in a book, electronic bookmarks are used to bring you back to a web site or other site you may want to return to. The Netscape browser lets you bookmark any site and save the bookmarks in a file you can recall at any time. Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the term “favorite” instead of bookmark for the same concept.

browser
The software used to view, manage, and access web pages by interpreting hypertext and hyperlinks. The two most common browsers are Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Web pages often appear differently depending on the brand and version of the browser intended to view them in.

If you’ve received our Christmas e-Shot but would prefer a traditional printed card please click here to download our Christmas Card template.

Merry Christmas and all the best for 2012!
The team @ Recognition

Acrobat
Acrobat is a application developed by Adobe to create and view PDF files. Acrobat is used to create the PDF files, and the freeware Acrobat Reader is used to read the PDF files.

Aliasing
Aliasing occurs when a computer monitor, printer, or graphics file does not have a high enough resolution to represent a graphic image or text. An aliased image is often said to be “jagged.”

Alignment
The positioning of a body of text. Text can be positioned to the left, right, or “center” of a page. For the best, consistent alignment, web site designers use tables and Cascading Style Sheets.

ALT-attribute
Part of the image source tag in HTML. A good web designer will always include text in all of your image sources for two reasons: (1) if any of your visitors choose not to view graphic images on your web pages, the alternative text will be shown; and (2) if your visitors use Internet Explorer as their browser and they leave the mouse over any graphic image, they will view the text in your ALT-attribute.

Animated GIF
A GIF graphic file, which consists of two or more images shown in a timed sequence to give the effect of motion.

Animation
Animation is the creating a timed sequence or series of graphic images or frames together to give the appearance of continuous movement.

Anti-Aliasing
Smoothing or blending the transition of pixels in an image. Anti-aliasing the edges on a graphic image makes the edges appear smooth, not jagged.

ASP (Active Server Page)
A dynamically generated web page, generally using ActiveX scripting. When a browser or a search engine spider requests an ASP page from a server, the server generates the web page with HTML code and gives it to the browser or spider.

What is a Font?

A font is all the letters, numbers, punctuation and other symbols which compose a typeface. Fonts were first developed as cast lead type for printing presses, and were later digitized as typefaces for use on computers.

The first font

The first typeface was designed by Johann Gutenberg, for his movable type press. Books were all hand-lettered at the time, and Gutenberg wanted to create a faster way to produce books that looked hand-lettered. He designed his type in the style of the Gothic blackletter at the time, so that his printed books would look hand-lettered.

As more printing shops opened up, printers began to look at other lettering styles to use as models for typefaces. More thought was put into creating typefaces, and this gave rise to the art of typographic design.

Roman and Italic styles

Nicholas Jenson designed the first true Roman typeface around 1460, which was used for books printed in Italy. This was an upright typeface that was lighter in design compared to the heavy blackletter type of German printing. To this day, upright typefaces are referred to as Roman, or Regular.

In the early 1500′s, Aldus Manutius developed the first Italic typeface with Francesco Griffo, influenced by the popularity of cursive writing. The capitals were still upright, but all lowercase letters were slanted to the right, like cursive writing. The slanted letters took up less space on the page, so books could be smaller in size and therefore less expensive. This style was called Italic, meaning from Italy, but today an italic typeface refers to slanted, or oblique, letters (including capitals).

The measurement of type

In the mid-1700′s, a French printer and typographer named Pierre Fournier le Jeune standardized the system of measuring typefaces. It was referred to as the Pica system of measurement and became widely used in England and America.

Type sizes were (and still are) measured in points. Type was cast in lead, and was sized relative to one inch. The lead pieces for one line of text had to line up evenly along the top and bottom of the pieces. The size of the text is measured from the top-most ascender to the bottom-most descender of all the letters within a typeface. The one inch measurement is divided into 72 points, and the common 12-point size is one pica, or one-sixth of an inch.

The fonts below are all 28 points in size. The top and bottom lines show the outer limits of the ascenders and descenders in the fonts. The fonts shown are Century Gothic, Adobe Caslon Pro, and Edwardian Script ITC.