Glossary of Promotional Product Terms

Our goal at Brandme is to ensure that your customer experience with us is top notch. One of the ways we strive to help your ordering process is to explain some of the terms we use in the promotional products industry. Some of our promotional product glossary terms cross over into the printing world and the art world, so in many cases these will also apply to printing glossary of terms and art glossary terms as well.

Printing Glossary Words:

Personalization: imprinting an item with a person’s name using one of several methods such as mechanical engraving, laser engraving, hot stamping, debossing, sublimation, or screen printing, to name a few.

Colourfill: Fills a table cell with the specified colour. It can be used to insert a background colour into another template without modifying the original.

Embroidery: Embroidery is the handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with needle and thread or yarn.

Pantone Matching System (PMS):  The Pantone Colour Matching System is largely a standardized colour reproduction system. By standardizing the colours, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colours match without direct contact with one another.

Screenprinting: Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil to receive a desired image. Imprint Area:

Etching: A protective coating that resists acid is applied to a surface, but the design is allowed to drop out. This leaves that part of the surface unprotected. An acid wash then eats the design into the surface, creating a contrast to that portion covered by the protective coating and was therefore not eaten by the acid.

Camera Ready: Common term used in the commercial printing industry meaning that a document is, from a technical standpoint, ready to “go to press”, or be printed.

Bleeds: printers cannot print right to the edge of a paper sheet. To create that effect, the printer must use a sheet, which is larger than the document size. Then the printer prints beyond the edge of the document size (usually 1/8”), then cuts the paper down to the document size.

Artwork Glossary Words:

Bitmap, PDF, Tiff, and EPS Files are all different image files stored digitally on a computer.

Promotional Industry Glossary Words:

Paper Proof: Impression of type or artwork on paper so the correctness and quality of the material to be printed can be checked. The least expensive is a regular black and white faxed paper proof.

Pre-Production Proof: An actual physical sample of the product itself produced and sent for approval before an order goes into production.

Production Time: The amount of time needed to produce and ship an order, once an order has been received and approved.