Confessions of a Newspaper Graphic Designer Pt. Deux - "The Lingo"
If you want to become one of the elite - a design monkey for a newspaper (hah, yes, that's funny) - then you need to not only walk the walk, but talk the talk. This should give you an introduction to some of the terminology used in the newspaper world, as well as a few other misc. tips.
Term number one: "Dummy". The dummy is a printed reference for the advertising layout. Believe it or not, advertising comes first in the newspaper industry - It is part of what determines how many pages the paper will be, what parts of the paper will have color (if you have limited color availability), and more.
The second term we will introduce is "spreads" or "printer spreads". If you have ever looked at a newspaper, you'll notice that on a 12 page paper, pages one and twelve will be on one side of a big sheet, and 2 an 11 will be on the other side. These are the spreads. Not all pages can be on a full spread, however, which brings us to our next term; the "dink".
The dink is a half-spread (single page) that is stuck in the middle of the paper when necessary. For instance, if you have a 10 page paper, you would have 2 full spreads (printed on both sides), plus a dink in the middle.
Two more important terms are the gray bar and/or color bar. These are both used to calibrate the colors in the press during the printing process and help align the separate plates ("separations", which is basically the individual plates for each color - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black and any extra spot color plates). At my newspaper, we use a gray bar. The gray bar is printed along the bottom (or vertically in the middle, in the case of a tab layout) using a specific combination of all four inks, which should create a gray shade. You should be able to check the gray bar with a densitometer, which will tell you how dense the ink is on the page.
One final term I'll leave you with in this article is one you should learn, and avoid having to say or hear as much as possible - Four-color black.
Four-color black refers to a true black that is composed of all four CMYK plates. This black is the black you see on screen, but in the newspaper industry, you want to avoid using it at all costs (except in the case of photos). The reason four-color black is a problem is you usually encounter it with ads and content from amateur designers whom have little to no professional newspaper design experience - and in most cases, the body type for the materials will be set in a four color black, which is near impossible to align well enough to read easily. That's why we have a black plate, known as "Key" - so we don't have to align 3 RGB plates for 8 point type.
Stay tuned for more terminology from the newspaper industry.
-WFL
Term number one: "Dummy". The dummy is a printed reference for the advertising layout. Believe it or not, advertising comes first in the newspaper industry - It is part of what determines how many pages the paper will be, what parts of the paper will have color (if you have limited color availability), and more.
The second term we will introduce is "spreads" or "printer spreads". If you have ever looked at a newspaper, you'll notice that on a 12 page paper, pages one and twelve will be on one side of a big sheet, and 2 an 11 will be on the other side. These are the spreads. Not all pages can be on a full spread, however, which brings us to our next term; the "dink".
The dink is a half-spread (single page) that is stuck in the middle of the paper when necessary. For instance, if you have a 10 page paper, you would have 2 full spreads (printed on both sides), plus a dink in the middle.
Two more important terms are the gray bar and/or color bar. These are both used to calibrate the colors in the press during the printing process and help align the separate plates ("separations", which is basically the individual plates for each color - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black and any extra spot color plates). At my newspaper, we use a gray bar. The gray bar is printed along the bottom (or vertically in the middle, in the case of a tab layout) using a specific combination of all four inks, which should create a gray shade. You should be able to check the gray bar with a densitometer, which will tell you how dense the ink is on the page.
One final term I'll leave you with in this article is one you should learn, and avoid having to say or hear as much as possible - Four-color black.
Four-color black refers to a true black that is composed of all four CMYK plates. This black is the black you see on screen, but in the newspaper industry, you want to avoid using it at all costs (except in the case of photos). The reason four-color black is a problem is you usually encounter it with ads and content from amateur designers whom have little to no professional newspaper design experience - and in most cases, the body type for the materials will be set in a four color black, which is near impossible to align well enough to read easily. That's why we have a black plate, known as "Key" - so we don't have to align 3 RGB plates for 8 point type.
Stay tuned for more terminology from the newspaper industry.
-WFL
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