Glossary of design concepts, D. DTP, DPI, Duotone etc.

Glossary of graphic design terms and concepts, beginning with the letter D.

Desktop Publishing

abbr. DTP
extend. Desk Top Publishing
Desktop publishing (DTP) was the catch-all term applied to the introduction of digital publishing systems in the 1980's. These systems replaced large, specialist design, pre-press and compositing systems.

DTP encompassed a mixture of tolls and technologies, but none more so than the combination of the Apple Macintosh computer, with its WYSIWYG interface, page layout software such as Pagemaker and PostScript laser printers. In practice DTP was, and remains, somewhat of a misnomer. Although a lot of the design and pre-press can be done on small 'desktop' systems, the actual printing still requires large and expensive output systems. Although, this is now gradually changing in some areas, with the advent of smaller run digital printing machines.

See also: WYSIWYG

Direct mail

Marketing communication carried out by mailshots. This can take the form of a designed letter, enclosed leaflets and forms, to the envelope itself.

Double page spread

abbr. DPS
A double page spread refers to a magazine design layout that spans across two pages. Usually, the design editor will arrange to spread the layout across the centre pages of the magazine, so as to ensure that the design lines up properly.

Dots-per-inch

abbr. DPI
extend. dots per square inch
The generally accepted term for describing the resolution an output device - such as imagesetters and printers. It is also used in relation to bitmap graphic files and scanned images, that are intended for printed output - as opposed to pixels per inch (PPI), which is used for images that are intended purely for on-screen use.

See also: Pixels Per Inch, the article DPI vs PPI is also worth checking out.

Drop shadow

A drop-shadow is the shading effect used to give the appearance of raised type or graphics on the designed page.

This can be either a solid drop shadow - used mainly for text headings - created by simply overlapping two identical headlines, darkening the bottom letters and shifting them a few millimetres. Or it can be a soft drop-shadow, which is usually created in an image manipulation program, such as Photoshop, by blurring the bottom layer to create a fuzzy appearance.

Duotone

A black and white photographic image that has been given a color tint, by duplication the image onto a second color channel.

Photoshop has a one stop 'Duotone' command that converts a grayscale image into a two color duotone, 3 color Tri-tone, or a 4 color Quad-tone. It is advisable, however, to then adjust each channel to ensure that the image has the correct tonal values for each channel and will print as intended.