Garbage – American rubbish
Out with the garbage and trash can and in with the rubbish bin. What a pity Microsoft wasn’t a British company. We’d have programmes, catalogues, and colour palettes. And toe-mar-toes . . Wouldn’t life just feel a little richer?

Gatefold – overzealous parking
A way of folding paper so that two parallel pages fold in towards each other so that they can be opened like a double gate. Often used for promotional material.

Giga – big boy
A lorra lorra numbers, one thousand million to be precise. Or if you’re a sad programmer you’ll know that for some indecipherable reason in computing it’s actually 1,073,741,824 bytes. As long as you’ve got more gigs than the guy in the next office you’ve not got anything to worry about. So don’t on my part.

GIF – a female American soldier
As an image format for storing graphics, the Graphics Interface Format is really quite useful and is used in web design a lot, more for graphic illustrations and simple animations, than photos which work better as JPEGs.

Gopher – broke
A menu driven tool Internet tool used to locate resources online. Originally developed by the geeks at the University of Minnesota.

Graphics – hiding place for illiterate designers
We like graphics, not just because we like creating them and can charge you money for doing so, but also because our designers can’t spell so we can’t let them loose on words. You probably really don’t want to know this but you can have vector and raster graphics. Vector work as very malleable geometric shapes and raster tend to fall apart if you pull them too hard. So be gentle.

Grey scale - determining the concentration of Grecian 2000™ needed
Something our designers need to get to grips with, but for the record it’s the shade of grey between white and black that determines image or character density. Or a hangover.

Gsm – a weighty matter
The weight of paper regardless of the size of the sheet. Typical photocopier paper would be around 80gsm and a quality brochure would be double this. Originally denoted by g/m2 or grammage as an abbreviation of grammes per square metre. Capitalised it becomes Global System for Mobile communications, a totally different ball game.

Gutter – dormitory at chucking-out-time
A printing term which refers to the space between columns of text or the inner margin of facing pages. The term really comes into its own when you overhear discussions about ‘bleeding into the gutter’ which doesn’t necessarily mean that some poor soul has met a sticky end (unless a designer misses a deadline that is), but just tells a printer that he’s going to have to spread his ink further so it runs between the two pages.