Glossary
The terms, defined.
Plain-English definitions of the mockup and design-file vocabulary behind our reviews — no jargon left unexplained.
- Bleed
- The extra margin of artwork extended beyond the final trim edge — typically 3 mm or 0.125 in — so that cutting variance never leaves a white sliver at the edge of a printed piece.
- Clipping mask
- A layer whose visibility is confined to the opaque pixels of the layer directly below it — a common, non-destructive way to constrain artwork to a shape.
- Commercial license
- The usage rights that permit a mockup or template to be used in paid client work or in products offered for sale — as opposed to personal-only or editorial-only use.
- Displacement map
- A greyscale image used to warp artwork so it follows the wrinkles, weave or curvature of the surface beneath it — what makes a mockup read as real rather than pasted on.
- Layer mask
- A greyscale mask attached to a single layer that controls its transparency pixel by pixel — white reveals, black hides — so you can conceal parts of a layer without erasing anything.
- Mockup
- A photorealistic template — usually a layered PSD — that shows how a design will look applied to a real-world object or surface, such as a business card, mug or sign.
- PSD
- The native layered file format of Adobe Photoshop — it preserves layers, smart objects, masks and effects, and is the format most professional mockups are delivered in.
- Resolution
- How much detail an image holds, measured in pixels; for print it is expressed as DPI/PPI (dots or pixels per inch), where 300 PPI at final size is the usual standard.
- Royalty-free
- A licensing model where you pay once and may use the asset many times with no per-use fees — but "royalty-free" is not the same as "free" or "unrestricted", and it usually still limits resale and redistribution.
- Smart object
- A Photoshop layer that holds embedded source content, letting you place or replace artwork non-destructively — the mechanism that makes a mockup reusable.
- Vector
- Artwork defined by mathematical paths rather than pixels, so it scales to any size without losing sharpness — the opposite of a raster (pixel-based) image.