Are you an Acronym pro?

25 July 2019 | by Tom Kilburn

Know your CMYK from your CSS? Your PDFs from your PSDs? How many of these digital, marketing and design acronyms do you actually know, and what do they stand for? Put yourself to the test below! [answers at the bottom of the page]

1. RGB

2. CMYK

3. PDF

4. GIF

5. JPEG

6. PNG

7. EPS

8. TIFF

9. PSD

10. CTA

11. CTR

12. CMS

13. HTML

14. CSS

15. SEO

16. UX

Get them all right, and you should be confident enough to say something like this:

"I've been developing the HTML and CSS for a website but I've been having a few problems. One of my designers sent me a bunch of PNG images when I asked for JPEGs, and they've been designed in CMYK, not RGB. It gets worse - our client can't decide on the CTA, our digital partner doesn't have a clue about UX, and our client can't open PSD files so we're having to send everything by PDF. I don't think this campaign's going to have a good CTR. Oh well - there's always this GIF to cheer me up:

cat gif  

Answers as follows:

1. RGB - 'Red Green Blue'. This universal colour profile mixes hues of red, green and blue to form additional colours, and is commonly used in digital design and on electronic devices.

2. CMYK - 'Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black'. Will also accept 'Key' instead of 'Black'. Another universal colour profile, favoured for print design.

3. PDF - 'Portable Document Format'. PDFs have been around for decades, yet is still the most popular file format for sharing documents despite its drawbacks. Consider using a more modern interactive content platform like Prism Present to display your high-value marketing collateral.

4. GIF - 'Graphics Interchange Format'. Everybody loves a GIF, right? While there's no doubt GIFs fund the internet's meme economy of 2019, they're also a valuable marketing resource, allowing you to visualise content in an entertaining and effective way without having to resort to video.

5. JPEG - 'Joint Photographic Experts Group'. Commonly abbreviated to JPG. The Joint Photographic Experts Group is a technical committee that created and maintains the standards of various types of JPGs. Cool, guys.

6. PNG - 'Portable Network Graphics'. PNGs are a web designer's best friend because they can be created with transparent backgrounds. They also support lossless data compression which means the original data can be restored even when compressed.

7. EPS - 'Encapsulated PostScript'. Eh? This is a graphics format for vector images. What's a vector image? It's a type of image that you can make as large as you want, without a loss in quality. They're most commonly used with Adobe Illustrator.

8. TIFF - 'Tagged Image File Format'. I bet you didn't get this one without cheating. Again, this is another file format favoured by graphic artists and photographers, because it's lossless (Like those PNGs above), but also difficult to edit. What's more, it's more secure than files like PDFs, because it's a clean file format that doesn't support links or hidden data. So no sneaky viruses.

9.PSD - 'Photoshop Document'. This is the default file type used by Adobe Photoshop, one of the primary weapons in the designer's arsenal. PSDs differ from other file types because they support multiple layers that can be manipulated and moved around for easier editing.

10. CTA - 'Call to Action'. If you're a marketer, and probably if you're in sales too, you should have got this one. Call to actions are perhaps the most important part of your marketing collateral - they're what you use to tell your prospects what to do. Without CTAs, you're just making nice things to read, not driving your prospects down the funnel.

11. CTR - Clickthrough Rate'. Will also accept 'Crash Team Racing', the recently remastered go-kart racing video game which stars everybody's favourite orange bandicoot.

12. CMS - 'Content Management System'. Most websites, apps, platforms and digital tools have a back end known as a CMS, that allows content marketers to upload and manage their digital content. For example, this blog has been published using the Hubspot CMS, an excellent tool that places all of your digital marketing resources (e.g. social, landing pages, email, CRM, workflows, strategy) in one tidy little place.Talk to us to find out more about Hubspot - we're a partner!

13. HTML - 'Hypertext Markup Language'. This is the backbone of the internet, and is the go-to language for any documentation designed to be displayed in a web browser. It's an ugly, simple language that gets a facelift from CSS, which you can find out more about below.

14. CSS - 'Cascading Style Sheet'. Without CSS, the internet would be a dull, dry affair. Think back to the early 90s, where every website looked the same. Blocky. Grey. Depressing. Comic Sans everywhere. 😵 CSS lets you do some pretty amazing things.

15. 'SEO - Search Engine Optimisation'. Everyone knows what SEO is, but knowing how to optimise for search engines is a different matter. With a range of ever-evolving algorithms, it's difficult to keep up! Get started by strategically picking your keywords, ensure your page titles and meta descriptions are set up right, and that your content is well-linked both internally and externally. This is just the tip of the iceberg - SEO is a slippery, yet highly lucrative, slope.

16. UX - 'User Experience'. Here's an example of a layout that creates a bad user experience:

Image result for funny examples of bad ux product

The same rules apply to web and app development. Think about how your users are going to actually use your software. Where are the snagging points? What's difficult to use? What's impossible to use? There's nothing more offputting than a bad UX, whether that's online or in the public toilets.

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