Craft

A short production and media glossary

These are working definitions for terms that appear in production notes, insertion orders, and media plans. They are not a typographic specimen and they are not a legal glossary.

Term	Meaning
Bleed	Image or colour that extends past the trim so a white edge does not appear if the sheet is cut slightly off. The printer specifies how much bleed to supply.
Crop marks	Hairline marks that show where the sheet will be trimmed. They sit outside the bleed.
Folio	The page number, and sometimes the running title, printed in the margin of a page.
Mechanical	The finished artwork file from which plates or a digital output are made. Older use referred to a pasted board. The job is the same: a complete, marked original.
Dummy	A folded or bound mock-up of a printed piece, used to check sequence, margins, and bulk before the run.
Keyline	A ruled line that shows the position of an element. In older paste-up, it also marked where a photograph would be stripped in.
Insertion order	The instruction that books a specific placement in a title or a broadcast schedule. It should name the date, the unit, the rate, and the material due date.
Flight	The start and end dates of a booked line in a media plan or a buy.
GRP	Gross rating points: a measure of weight used in some broadcast and some planned mixed schedules. It is not the same as a number of people reached, and it should not be written as if it were.
Proof	A copy of the job made so typographic and colour decisions can be checked before the run. The type of proof (soft, contract, or press) should be stated, because they are not interchangeable.
Make-good	A replacement placement offered when a booked insertion did not run as ordered, or ran with a fault. It should be recorded on the post-buy.
Tear sheet	A page taken from the printed title as evidence that an insertion ran. Digital placements use a screenshot or an affidavit instead, and the plan should say which is expected.