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KISS(Keep it simple stupid)

Rule 2

Take advice, you never know too much that you can’t take the advice of others, look at other magazines, newsletters etc, and especially, the rest of this list…

Rule 3

Determine what kind of document you’re producing. If we can break it down into two kinds:

… you have to read me, so it really doesn’t matter how I make it look, and I don’t give a damn anyway…

… please read me, I have something to offer and I hope you’ll take the time to read on…

for those with the first kind of document, just stop reading now, for others…

Rule 4

Is it a formal or informal document?

Formal documents need to be well structured, look as if they mean what they say, keep them consistant in terms of fonts and layout… be businesslike

Informal documents can be looser, make them inviting, choose an informal (optima etc) font, lots of white space. Make the reader want to read on.

Rule 5

There are a number of socially correct mechanisms to make sure that whatever type of document you are producing looks good …

One font for body text and one for headline text …

Never put more that one space between words, especially after punctuation. …

Respect other languages, use the correct accents when appropriate …

use the correct quotation marks (not feet and inches symbols) …

be consistant with paragraph spacing (first line indent, inter paragraph gap) …

not too much hyphenation (if any) …

beware of widows and orphans…

respect your reader

Rule 6

Select an appropriate format for the type of document you are producing. A5 booklet, A4 report, A3 broadsheet etc.

Rule 7

Consider the reproduction mechanism. …

If you are photocopying the end document, beware of the limitation of tints on any specific photocopier (hint: fine tints smudge on some copiers) …

Professional printing of the final document: choose your paper with care, ask the advice of your local printer (print office) before getting too deep in the production process. If they have preferences regarding the tools they use for preparation of documents, consider them (ie Pagemaker etc).

Rule 8

Keep backups (copies) of items as you go along, make sure that you have copies of all documents (pictures, logos, main document etc) well secure. Sodd’s law will ensure that something untoward happens in the last hour of your deadline.

Rule 9

Having selected a publication format, edit to that format, not the other way around. Do not try and make the format fit the pieces…

Rule 10

Remember Rule 1

Black should be only 100%K, not composite from all colors
You have to keep in mind that printing process has minimum 4 passes (to print full color – in Offset technology), and that alignment of these four passes may not be 100% same. Every pass is one color. So if you make text from 100C 100M 100Y 100K composite, you will have noise at letter’s edges. Photoshop has habit to form black from all composites so pay attention to select only pure black (0C 0M 0Y 100K) when you write text.

Use minimum 300DPI for Offset and 600DPI for Digital printings
Human eye can easily notice granulation of image raster if its resolution is lower than 96 DPI. Common Offset printing plates (machines) support 300DPI, so use this quality and make design in that resolution. Also, some digital printers support more dots per inch so you can make design from 600 to 1200 DPI’s, but it is very hard to notice difference between 600 DPI and higher. In special cases if you make design for buildboard, you can use 30 DPI, because of view distance.   

Clean up small composite values
Keep in mind that every colored surface is made from these 4 components mentioned before. If you have on some surface less then 10% of some color, it is better to modify that color component to 0% in order to avoid edge noise. You will make small change on color. Also if you try to print 5% of some composite it is very small chance that something will be printed at all on Offset printing.  
Example: if you fill background with gray color: 5C 5M 5Y 5K you will probably bet totally white surface, but, if you use 0C 0M 0Y 11K, which gives very similar color on screen, you will have some gray color on background.
Simply, printing and screening technologies are different.

Make from 3 to 5 mm bleed on every edge that should be trimmed
Printing surface is always bigger than required dimensions. When you do screen design you don’t think about cutting, because it doesn’t exist on screen, but, when you do design for paper you have to keep in mind that someone will have to cut edges of your design. So there is Trimmed dimensions and Not-Trimmed. As designer you are thinking in trimmed dimensions, but when you send file on printing you have to make tolerance in case that swings that cuts paper to fit required dimensions make mistake, and, it always make some mistake. If you don’t make your design bigger you will have white stripes at edges of your catalogue or flyer.   

Keep in mind that US print shops use the English system religiously. In case you didn’t know, points and picas come from the English system, and its much easier for us to use all of our technology with those measurements. The bleed (that’s the area of excess design to allow for cutting) is always 1/8″ or less depending on the room on the plates.   

In case of flyer, you have to make this bleed for all edges, in case of catalogue, only outer edges should have this because, edge that comes to bending line doesn’t have cutting.

Make margins at least 5mm
All elements of design and all texts should be at least 5mm from edge of cut. I tried with 3mm, it was bad looking because on some places distance was smaller because problem of swings. In some cases you can go up to 10mm of margin.   

That is something that I noticed that beginners in graphic design should know. There is also some pure design tips about contrasts and colors, but I’ll leave it for some other tutorial.   

Use TIFF as final file format
I advise you to use TIFF format when you send design to printer company. I had cooperation with many printing companies and printing professionals and everybody agree that TIFF / CMYK is most trusted image format for color-safe exporting and transporting from design workstation to film exposition company.   

It is safe to use: LZW compression (more compatible) or ZIP compression (less compatible). For final file you can discard layers to reduce file size. Skilled print workers reported that ZIP compression may lead to corruption later on in the process of printing, also that LZW compression is not allowed by some applications (Heidelburg).   

Check http://www.omnetwork.net for more tutorials covering this and other design topics.

About author: Goran Grubic is skilled print and web designer from Serbia running design portal omnetwork.net (http://www.omnetwork.net/) which offers for free large unique tutorial library (covering Photoshop, Flash, 3D Studio, Dreamweaver and similar topics), free graphic resources (templates, elements, 3D models etc.), photography (free&royalty free, just use it!) and sounds&music loops for multimedia web development.

This example shows how to Load, Add, Subtract, and Intersect selections between overlapping layers just with quick thumbnail clicks.

Load Pixels to Selections

In “Layer 2″ Command-click to load a fill as a selection. Any pixel which is not transparent in “Layer 2″ will be loaded as a selection. This is not the same as copying the layer, only its outline. The green fill shows the selected region although you will get only the surrounding Marquee. Let’s call this state (with “Layer 2″ selected) the initial state.

Addition

With the “Layer 2″ loaded as a selection, Command + Shift-click on “Layer 1″ to add it to the selection. Now non-transparent pixels of both “Layer 1″ and “Layer 2″ are combined as the new selection. Notice the small plus sign in the Command-Click box.

Subtraction

Revert to the initial state and Command + Alt-click on “Layer 1.” This will subtract any overlapping pixel of “Layer 1″ from the current selection of “Layer 2.” Notice the minus sign.

Intersection

Revert to initial state and Command + Alt + Shift-click on “Layer 1″ to keep only the overlapping pixels as a selection. Notice the X sign. If the layers are not overlapping this action will deselect all.

Garbage Masks

Garbage Masks are created to roughly isolate the ‘region of interest’ from rest of the image. Further trimming is carried out inside the Garbage Mask with precision.

Vector and Raster Selections

Draw an outline around the region of interest in the image with any of the Lasso Tools and double-click to complete the selection. A Garbage Mask needs to be saved for further refining, which can be done both as a Layer or Vector Mask. We must choose it depending on complexity of the outline and how we are planning to trim it later on. With the Lasso selection click Add Layer Mask to save it as a Layer Mask.

Alternatively, we can also save the selection as a Vector Mask which can be later refined by working on the shape spline that defines its outline. With the Lasso selection still intact (2), go to the Paths tab (3b) and click Make Working Path from the Selection button at the bottom. This will save the selection outline as a Shape Working Path.

Now load the selection again, and return to Layers tab. Click Add Layer Mask once to create a Layer Mask (Command-click to load again) then click the same button( 6b) once more to Add Vector Mask. Saving selections as Vector Masks or Shapes saves memory.

Selecting with Vector Mask

Click on the Vector Mask to activate it. Or selecting any of the Shape tools will make it active. Vector Masks are modified by adjusting the spline positions (Control Points) and curvature (Tangents). You can disable, delete, or save the Layer Mask with another Layer. The Convert Point tool is most suitable for altering Vector shapes and Paths. Click and drag on the handles, then Command-click on control points to move them.

Once a acceptable outline has been achieved use the Add Points tool to refine and further match the outlines. Delete points when necessary. Dragging handles with Command + Shift will lock their relative slopes. Drag directly on the Control Point to reset handles. Regular curvy shapes are best to be extracted with this process.

This method is also best in situations where boundaries are not clearly visible.

Select by Color Range

Selecting by color is the fastest way to Chroma select. Click Select > Color Range and select a color with the Eyedropper Tool available. Once selected certain shades can be removed selectively with the Minus (-) Eyedropper or again added with the Plus (+) Eyedropper. There is also a preview window that displays the selected region or the original image.

This tool can be used to setup Garbage Masks around the subject and later refine it with editing the Mask. Select by color is not a one-click solution, but does a great job in minimizing manual work.

Chroma from Channels

Color information of each type are stored in as separate channels, which can be viewed in the Channels Tab. We can use the channel wise variations in color intensities for selecting objects in the image. This process is helpful only when background and foreground have separate color distribution in at least one channel.

Advanced Chroma

In the Histogram we can see that the blue channel is predominant in the image and it extends up to the highlights where other channels are very weak. Our subject here is the patch of vegetation in foreground.

Picking the Best Channel

A simple observation of the three channels tell us that the blue channel has the highest contrast between the Sky and Grass. We are going to exploit this property to separate the two. Duplicate (Command + J) the Layer and go to the Blue channel of the Copied layer. Click Image > Adjustments > Curves or Press Command + M to apply curves modification on the current channel.

Applying Curves

Select the point closer to the dark grays of the channel and drag it (2) forward in the x-axis (horizontally) keeping y-axis at 0 (shown by the small circle). This will make the darker pixels uniformly more darker. It shouldn’t affect the background, drag it a little back to left if it does.

Next, select another point closer to the White Point, drag it (3) back towards the midtones keeping the y-axis(vertical) at maximum (shown by the small circle). What we are doing is saturating the dragged range of blue up to 100%. Make sure the whole background turns white or almost so, and there is a very high contrast between the Grass and Sky.

Channel as Mask

Command-click on the channel thumbnail to load the channel into the selection. Areas which are predominantly blue will be selected totally and the rest according to respective degrees. Areas which have no blue (the black parts) will be left from the selection. With the selection in place go to the Layers tab and click Add Layer Mask to save the selection as a Mask.

Inverting the Mask

Press Command + I to invert the Layer Mask.

Selecting by Brushing on Masks

Brush based selection is used to extract foregrounds with complex outlines with accuracy. It is also used to refine selections made with other techniques. And it also support transparency (softness).

Erasing is probably the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about brush based selection. But it is not a recommended process at all. Erasing is a destructive process and can permanently damage the original image as recovery is limited only to a number of undo levels we have set.

Brushing with Layer Masks

Here too Layer Masks can be used, to preserve the workflow of Eraser and additional possibility of recoveringremoved portions if they are needed. Painting on the Layer Mask with a White or Black will reveal or hide the contents respectively. We can brush out backgrounds in the same way as in using the Eraser tool and get it back by painting with White.

No Feedback

When brushing the mask we may sometimes trim off relevant parts accidently and keep focusing on the wrong silhouette only to be discovered later. This is highly probable when foreground background have similar hues and there is no immediate visual feedback.

Immediate Feedback

This problem can be averted by following a simple rule of keeping a multiplied duplicate of the current layer in the background as a guide layer. Multiplied gradient maps will show-up as high contrast versions of the subject outlines if violated.

Luma Select

As already mentioned Luma is the illumination levels of an image. Luma can be used to extract components from the image which have a considerable brightness difference than others.

Simplest Luma Hack

Unlock the background and make a duplicate of it, then hide the original Layer.

Apply Threshold

Apply a Threshold Adjustment Layer on top. You will notice that some parts of the image have been turned instantly black and rest are pure white, and there are no intermediate grayscale levels.

Adjust Threshold

Adjust the Threshold Slider and try to enclose the subject or background (whichever is darker) in black. Hide the Threshold layer and look at the original image for guidance when required.

Merge Layers

Command-click to select the top two layers and Merge them into one. Select the bottom layer, make it visible and create a blank Layer Mask.

Add Layer Mask

Copy the merged image and paste to the Layer Mask, following the process discussed above. We have our Layer Mask ready, but in most cases there will be holes and parts of our background visible. Use the Mask Painting technique discussed above to make it tidy. Invert if necessary.

Luma Select with Transparency

The Threshold technique discussed above is very fast to implement, but is only useful for extracting solid objects as it lacks transparency. The following method can be useful in situations where we need Luma extraction with transparency. Here we are going to remove the ice-water from the rest of the rocks.

Using Luma to Mask with Transparency

Unlock and Create a layer from the background (1). Apply an Adjustment Layer Black and White on top and then a Brightness-Contrast Adjustment Layer above it.

Reduce Brightness

Select Use Legacy mode and slowly move the Brightness slider to left, try to get as many black areas from the rocks as possible. This process will reduce the brightness of the Water too so don’t overdo it.

Increase Contrast

Now slowly increase the Contrast slider to the right. With each increase dark-grays will turn to black and lighter grays will glow more brightly. We are going to get the whites as opaque and grays as semi-transparent. Try to get both Whites and Grays where necessary. Over increasing the contrast will make it look like a Threshold Layer, if so there will be no translucency left.

Merge the Layers

When satisfied with the results Merge the top three Layers. Go to the background layer and Add a Layer Mask and copy the merged Layer into the Layer Mask.

Yet Another Possibility

Other than the above two procedures there is also another way of Luma based extraction using the Lab color method.

Lab Color Technique

Open an image and turn it to Lab Color mode by clicking Image> Mode> Lab Color. Goto Channels Tab and find the lightness channel or press Ctrl+1 to directly select it. This is where the illumination levels of all pixels are indexed in the Lab Color mode. You can play with that channel and try to isolate some element from the background. Don’t forget to duplicate the Layer or the Channel before you alter any channel.

And filters that doesn’t work on the image in Lab Color mode works on the Lightness channel, and yield almost similar results.

Conclusion

Photoshop has quite a few options when it comes to selection techniques. Try applying some of these solutions in your workflow to increase your productivity and effectiveness.

]]> http://bhuwant.com.np/blog/2009/07/a-comprehensive-introduction-to-photoshop-selection-techniques/feed/ 0 http://bhuwant.com.np/blog/2009/06/mac-shortcut-keys-common-keys/ http://bhuwant.com.np/blog/2009/06/mac-shortcut-keys-common-keys/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:55:30 +0000 admin http://bhuwant.com.np/?p=225 The most useful shortcut keys on Mac is the one for Expose and Dashboard so if you still haven’t configured them on your keyboard (or mouse) go to System Preferences ->Dashboard & Expose and configure them.

This is the first set of the 10 most useful shortcut keys on Mac that you really need to get a hang of to be productive in everyday use. 

• shift + apple key (command) + delete – empty trash
• ctrl + n – new mail window (in Mail application)
• shift + apple key + d – send mail
• apple key + w – close active window
• shift + apple key + left/right arrow – tab navigation in Safari browser
• mouse drag and drop + hold option – copy file
• mouse drag and drop + hold option + apple – create alias (shortcut)
• apple + space – on/off spotlight (search)
• apple + tab – switch to another active app
• apple + q – quit active application

1. Work with vectors
   This probably sounds obvious to most designers out there, but it isn’t to everybody so I repeat it as often as I can to avoid receiving those damn jpeg logos. Vector formats are the ones that will allow the most variations for your logo.
2. Don’t use more than 2 fonts
   There is many nice fonts out there and we would all love to use as many as we can. Unfortunately using too many fonts will most of the time result in a loss of coherence. Using two different fonts can be good to create a contrast, catching the eye.
3. Keep it readable
   If people can’t read your logo, it’s useless to have one. This sounds like dumb advice again, but it’s easy to get caught in creating letters or distorting a font until it becomes unreadable. Always stay aware of that when working on your logo.
4. Test sizes
   Your logo should resize well at any size, whether it’s huge on a truck or tiny on a badge.
5. Adapt it for dark backgrounds
   So you’ve got a wonderful looking dark logo, but now your client want to get it on his black car. It’s usually not too hard to adapt it, but you’ll look more professional if you already got that case figured out.
6. Make sure it works well in black and white
   I have a very simple technique for that: I work every logo in black and white before adding any colour. This way choices are made judging by the shapes and you are not distracted by anything else. It makes it much easier to know that your logo will work well in shades of grey afterwards.
7. Don’t include photos in your logo
   Well… this one goes along with the first tip. First, photos are not vectors. Photos also don’t scale, have no branding value and are hard to adapt for any use.
8. Look at it upside-down
   This is a tip I got from my teachers in graphic design school, looking at your logo (or any printed design really) will get the meaning out of the way and give you a new look at the design’s balance and white spaces. Try it!
9. Don’t follow trends
   It’s often hard to escape trends, especially if you’re passionated and love to look at inspiring logos on design sites. Your logo has to work on the long run, so try to avoid the web 1.0 swoosh or the web 2.0 reflection.
10. Get specific feedback
    Asking people’s opinion is worthless if you don’t know what informations you want to get, so when getting feedback, try asking specific questions (eg. does your logo expresses the industry of the company?).

When photographing your business cards, spending some time picking out a great background can go a long way compared to just shooting them on your scratched up work desk. Look for something that compliments your business cards color, texture and style. Just make sure that the background does not overpower the actual design. A busy background will distract the viewer from the beauty of your work. Try using a neutral color, a contrasting color that makes your design pop or keep the focus sharp on the design and blur out the background a bit.

2. Bring Out the Texture

Some of the best business cards use high-quality card stock or unusual mediums to print the cards on. If you have spent a lot of time and money on extra touches like texture for your cards why not let it shine in your photographs. Texture is not only wonderful to feel, but it can make cards look amazing. When you shoot your cards make sure you can see the texture in the photos. To do so you may need to play with the focus, take close up shots and adjust background colors.

3. Picking the Perfect Position

Nothing is more boring than shooting your cards flat on a table looking directly down on them. Try experimenting with different views, positions, heights, distances and so on so you can get a photo that looks dynamic. The more photos you take in different positions the better your chances will be of finding that perfect shot.

4. Focus on the Focus

Its extremely important to make sure your photo is in focus, because a blurred photo is painful to look at!. Play around with the focus and make sure the important part of the card is clearly in focus. Beautiful typography on your cards will be wasted if you cant capture it properly with the camera.

5. Lighting, Lighting, Lighting

A large part of photography has to do with proper lighting and this can often be very difficult to achieve. Try experimenting with both natural lighting such as outdoor lighting and artificial lighting by using photography lights that you can adjust. bad lighting can make your photos look faded, bland, unprofessional and really just do more harm than good. So make sure you spend plenty of time experimenting with lighting so you can achieve the exact look you are going for.

For a brochure whose primary purpose is to advertise or market products and services, the cover will most likely have two parts: a catchy phrase that grabs the potential customer’s attention, and then lists the benefits of the product (what will this product do for me?). In the instance of a brochure that is primarily educational or informative, the product generally appears on the cover with the information of what it does or can do listed inside. The entertaining brochure is used the least. You might see it in a family-style restaurant, for example, and it contains puzzles, drawings, etc. for kids to keep them occupied. But, for this piece, I’ll focus on the first two types of brochures.
The next thing you and the client need to decide is the number of panels in the brochure, which is influenced by a number of factors. Some questions to consider:
· How much information will be in this brochure?
· How is this brochure going to be used?
· Is there a bleed?
· Is the brochure going to be of a unique design that might include die-cuts or unusual folding?
· Will the brochure be a direct mail piece? If so, what are the postal regulations for the size and mailing costs?
· Also under mailing, will there be a returned piece such as a Business Reply Card (BRC)?
· What is the allotted budget for the brochure?
Designers need to get the parameters and specifications from the client before they proceed, as these may greatly affect the cost. Printers can also be a tremendous resource in explaining how a brochure’s parameters and specifications will affect everything from the size of paper a brochure is printed on, to trimming, folding, and special cuts.
Once those decisions are made, the graphic designer and client need to discuss what is often referred to as the “hierarchy of information” or what’s the order of information; starting with the most important and moving onto the least. At this stage, you’ll need to know on which panel or panels information is being placed. In some brochures, information (particularly photographs and maps) can go across two panels to striking effect. At the same time, when thinking about how the brochure will be laid out, consider whether each individual panel will hold distinct information or are the panels related?
You’re still not quite ready to move into the actual design process as you need to refer back to that target audience the brochure is aimed at. Here you need to know the answer to the following question: what is the message the client is sending with this brochure? Advertising, educating, informing, and entertaining are how that message is presented; the actual message is what you want to say about the particular product, service, or company.
When all that information is gathered, you can finally get down to the business of designing. You’ll take into account the basic elements of good design – alignment, repetition for a sense of unity, contrast and a focal point that provides interest, balance, scale and perspective, color, and so on. You’ll also want to keep in mind the font, size, color, and orientation of the text.
As with any design there are also things you’ll want to avoid. These include:
· Avoid over-used typefaces, two of which are Arial and Helvetica.
· For content type, keep the point size under 12.
· Don’t use more than three type faces in a brochure.
· Generally don’t use more than one alignment.
As you can see, designing even a standard six-panel brochure is often a much more complicated process than you initially might think. The more organized you are, the easier the graphic design process will be, and probably a lot more fun. With any design project, it’s a good idea to have all the necessary information, pictures, parameters, and specifications before you let your creative juices flow.

Ad Server – A computer, normally operated by a third party, that delivers and tracks advertisements independent of the web site where the ad is being displayed. Use of an ad server helps establish trust between an advertiser and publisher since the statistics are maintained by a objective third party.

Ad Space – The space on a web page reserved for the displaying of advertisements. Typically at the top or bottom of a page or if a small advertisement in the right or left column. The most desirable ad space is above the fold.

Ad Units – A way of classifying ad types. Ad units on the Internet include banners, buttons, micro buttons, pop ups, skyscrapers, text links, interstitials, superstitials, etc. Ad units are usually defined by the IAB as voluntary guidelines.

Bandwidth – The amount of data (text, video, sound, images, animations) that can be moved through an Internet connection. The amount is typically measured in bits per second (bps). A high speed Internet connection such as a cable or DSL modem provides more bandwidth than a 56K dial up modem. Also know as throughput.

Banner – A graphic that appears on a web page that is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site. May be in a variety of formats including GIF, JPEG, Flash, HTML, Java, JavaScript & more. See samples here.

Campaign – The process of planning, creating, buying and tracking an advertising project from start to finish.

Click Rate – The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through. Calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. For example if a banner was click on 13 times after being displayed 1000 times, the banner would have a click rate of ( 13 � 1000 = .013 ) 1.3%. This is also commonly know as a banners click through rate.

Click Through – The action of clicking on a banner and having ones browser automatically redirected to the web page a banner is hyperlinked to.

Conversion – Term used to describe the process of getting a web visitor to accept an offer or become a paying customer. Advertisers strive for high conversion ratios.

Cookies – A process by which a small file is sent from a web server to the local users computer to store information unique to that browser. Often used by advertisers to keep track of the number and frequency of advertisements that have been shown to a visitor or by sites to help them determine the number of unique visitors.

CPC – Cost per click (CPC) is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pays for each click through made on their advertisement. Prices typically range from 1� to over 50� per click through. This is an ideal method of payment for advertisers who need to guarantee they only pay for those viewers of the banner that click on it and visit a page on their site.

CPM – Cost per thousand (CPM) is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pays for every 1000 impressions of their advertisement. Prices typically range from $1 to over $50 per thousand impressions. This is an ideal method of payment for advertisers who want to guarantee only the number of people who sees their banner. The “M” in CPM is from the Roman numeral for 1000. The Roman numeral M was derived from the latin word “mille” meaning “thousand”.

Creative – The technology used to create a banner or other type of advertising material. Common creative types include GIF, JPEG, Java, HTML, Flash or streaming audio/video.

Flash – A software plugin that enables browsers to play multimedia animations. Some rich media advertisements require users to have this plugin.

GIF – The graphical interchange format (GIF) is a graphical file extension. Most banner advertisements are created in the GIF format. More popular than the JPEG format. GIF89a or animated GIFs are a sequences of standard GIF images combined to create animated banners. These animated banners tend to generate higher click through rates than non-animated banners.

House Ads – A type of banner advertisement that a web site publisher runs in an ad space when no paying advertisement is available to fill the space. Typically filled with an advertisement promoting one of the web sites services, products or features.

Impressions – The number of times a banner ad was requested and presumably seen by users. It is often hard to obtain an accurate impression count as they can be undercounted due to issues relating to cache or overcounted due to requests that were not completed. See monthly page impressions here.

Insertion Order – A online or printed document that specifies the details of an advertising campaign. The terms of the agreement may also be specified on the insertion order or they may be placed in a separate document but are almost always referred to the insertion order if not present.

Inventory – The number of ad spaces available for sale on a web site during a certain time frame. Determined buy taking into consideration the number of advertisements on a page, the number of pages with advertisements and the number of page views during a specific time frame.

Media Kit – Information offered to potential advertisers by publishers to help advertisers understand the publishers rates, visitor demographics, terms, etc.

Non Remnant – Used in research, but applied to online advertising specifically it refers to ad space sold directly by the primary owner of the ad space versus remnant display which is sold through third party.

Page View (or Page Impression) – Occurs when a users browser requests a web page. A single page view may create multiple hits to the server if the page contains multiple elements such as banners. Since page views do not take into consideration users who may have their browsers set to disable images, they are of little value to advertisers.

Pixel – Short for picture element (Pixel), a pixel is a measurement representing a single point in a graphic. Most ad units are measured in pixels such as the common 468 pixel x 60 pixel sized baner.

Pop Behind (or Pop Under) – A type of advertisement that is automatically displayed in a second smaller browser window behind the current window apon loading or unloading a normal web page. Pop behind advertisements tend to cost advertisers more since their visibility is higher but are considered less annoying than pop ups by web site visitors.

Psychographics – Identification of personality characteristics and attitudes that affect a person’s lifestyle and purchasing behaviors. Psychographic data points include opinions, attitudes, and beliefs about various aspects relating to lifestyle and purchasing behavior.

Rank – A web site or advertisement’s standing in comparison to other web sites or advertisements. Rank provides advertisers with information on performance comparisons. See All About Jazz’s Alexa, MarketLeap, and Quantcast ranks.

Reach – The number of unique visitors that visited a site over the course of the reporting period, expressed as a percent of the universe for the demographic category. Also called unduplicated audience.

Regional (Geo Target) – Often used to describe web page requests that originated from a similar geographical area. This is measured by analyzing a server’s log files for requests from ISPs and then aggregating those requests by region according to the ISPs geographical location.

Remnant Space – Advertising space that remains unsold right before it is about to be used and thus often sold at a discount at the last minute.

RFP – A request for proposal (RFP) is a term that may be used by an advertiser that is requesting some type of advertising arrangement with a web site.

ROS – Run of site (ROS) means a banner will appear anywhere on a web site as opposed to run of category (ROC) which would appear only on pages within a specific category.

Rich Media – A type of advertisement technology that often includes richer graphics, audio or video within the advertisement. Unlike static or animated GIF banner advertisements, rich media advertisements often enable users to interact with the banner without leaving the page on which it appears. Some popular types of rich media banners are created with HTML, Shockwave & Flash.

Rotation – A banner that is in rotation on a page or group of pages, will not be the only banner shown when any of the pages are reloaded. Sometimes an advertiser will request a banner not be shown in rotation in which case it would appear every time the page is loadedalso know as exclusivity.

SEO – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of promoting a web site through a search engine’s organic listings.

Targeted – Refers to advertisements that are aimed, on the basis of demographic analysis, at one specific subsection of the market.

Unique Visitors – A term used to describe the total number of visitors to a site over a certain time period. The only way to accurately track this is to require each visitor to login with a unique user name to gain access to a site. Relying exclusively on IP addresses in a log file is not recommended as it would not take into consideration multiple users accessing ones site through the same IP addresssuch as would happen at companies and schools. Cookies are also used sometimes, but since they can be disabled or cached, they cannot be relied apon exclusively. See monthly visitors and unique vistors here.

Webcasting – A process where by sound and/or video is broadcast online. The process can deliver live or prerecorded information. Often advertisements are inserted at the beginning of the broadcast.