Glossary of graphic design terms and concepts, beginning with the letter R.
R
RGB
Red, green and blue are the 3 colors that are used by monitors to display images. They are called additive colors because the more of each of each RGB color that is added, the brighter the resultant color. 100% of RGB will produce white.
A river is a typographic term for the ugly white gaps that can occur in justified columns of type, when there is too much space between words on concurrent lines of text. Rivers are especially common in narrow columns of text, where the type size is relatively large.
Rivers are best avoided by either setting the type as ragged, increasing the width of the columns, decreasing the point size of the text, or by using a condensed typeface. An often overlooked method of avoiding rivers, is the careful use of hyphenation and justification settings in page layout programs such as QuarkXpress or InDesign.
Runaround
In desktop publishing layout programs, such as QuarkXpress and InDesign, it is often desirable to place photographs, logos, or other digital images within blocks of text. The ability to divert blocks of text around the placed images, is known as running the text around. In QuarkXpress and InDesign, it is possible to set the amount of distance that the text will run around an image and also the method of runaround.
Running head
A title or heading that runs along the top of a printed publication, usually a magazine.
