Dale's Glossary of Graphic Design Definitions

CMYK Color: A printing industry standard for color management. Sometimes referred to as full-color or four-color printing, CMYK uses the overlapping color values for the transparent inks of Cyan (Blue), Magenta (Red), Yellow, and K (Black) to reproduce realistic color across a broad spectrum of visible colors. The CMYK spectrum of color is a subtractive color model that has a more limited spectrum of color than the RGB color model and should always be verified independently of each other when color matching is critical.
Graphic Art: The profession associated with using the fine and applied arts to represent, decorate, write, print, and publish concepts and ideas in an understandable and coherent manner to generate a desired response from the viewer.
Graphic Artist: A professional artist who specializes in organizing and designing elements and information for visual (graphic) presentation.
Graphic Design: The art or profession of manipulating design elements such as imagery, typography, and color to present information or generate a desired reaction. Not every artist is or can be a graphic designer, but not always vice versa, because every graphic designer is an artist in some form or another.
RGB Color: An additive color model where Red, Green, and Blue light are added to each other to reproduce a broad range of colors. Used for the display of computer monitor and television images, the RGB color model has a much broader spectrum of color reproduction than the CMYK model. Although RGB displays can be calibrated to approximately match the final color output of a CMYK printed piece, the color spectrums are vastly different and should never rely upon each other when color is critical.
PMS (Pantone Matching System) Color: Although PMS is a color industry standard for color matching everything from paint to cloth to plastics and more, a PMS Color usually refers to a printer's term for a standard selection of Spot Color ink swatches that can be matched consistently and accurately across platforms and output devices.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the process of building and adding elements to a web site to enhance the site's ability to be found when a browser performs a search for a particular targeted set of keywords and or phrases. SEO can consist of on-page content such as the headlines and body copy as well the off-page content, which can be made up from meta-tags that include the page title, description, keywords, and alt tags.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM is a style of marketing a web site on the internet through increased visibility on search engine result pages (See SERPs) by using paid ad placement and inclusion on the SERPs.
SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages): SERPs refers to a list of web sites and pages that are retuned to a browser in response to a keywords and or phrases search.
Spot Color: A Spot Color, sometimes referred to as a PMS color, is a subtractive color system used as a printing industry standard for color management that specifies a single color to reproduce the final printed color. A Spot Color can be used as a cost-effective alternative to CMYK color, but it also used when an exact color match is required.