Words mean things — let's talk like experts
You'd think in advertising we'd all understand the power of making a good impression, and how image is everything (or, at least, a very very important thing). But a pet peeve of mine, which comes up way too often and drives me crazy, is when colleagues use the wrong terminology when discussing the topics we're supposed to be experts in — and this often happens in front of our clients. I promise you, our clients (well, some of them) notice and judge us for these things. When we use the wrong terms while discussing digital media, we simply look less digitally savvy as an organization. And that can hurt our business. As digital professionals we should all feel a responsibility to sound like we know what we're talking about, and inspire confidence in our clients.
So, I'm hoping this might help; here's a list of the terms and names that people most commonly get wrong...
Number of "breakpoints"
If we're designing for two viewports (mobile and desktop), that's one breakpoint. I often hear people call say "We're designing for two breakpoints; mobile and desktop." Think of the breakpoint as an invisible line between the two views. I have more about this in my Responsive 101 article. Three viewports? That's two breakpoints.
Speaking of breakpoints...
"Mobile version and desktop version"
When discussing our layouts, let's avoid saying "the mobile version" and "the desktop version." Better to say "the mobile view" and "the desktop view" — they're two different views of one responsive piece. When I view the finished website on my laptop, and on my phone, I'm not looking at two different versions of the site; I'm looking at two different views of one site.
By the way, this is indirectly related: while we're on the subject of making sure we sound like digital experts, challenge yourself to do this: program your brain to always say "mobile and desktop" versus "desktop and mobile." Mentioning mobile before desktop, every time, is one tiny element that shows that we're an agency that thinks mobile first. These little impressions matter.
Okay, next up, this is very specifically pharma one, regarding Veeva's suite of etailing products...
"iRep"
People, Veeva stopped using the name iRep back in... (counting on my fingers here)... 2018 at the latest. It may have been a year or two before that. The Veeva suite of edtailing projects is called Veeva CRM, and their in-person presentation platform, which used to be called iRep, is now called Veeva CLM. Has been for many years. I've seen colleagues talk about "iRep" in front of clients, and the clients have corrected them. When we've just sold them an IVA that will cost them tens of thousands of dollars, this is a bad look.
While I'm on the subject of Veeva: a team really threw me for a loop a couple years ago when they invited me to a meeting about making a series of "Vmails"; I had absolutely no idea what this was and couldn't wait to find out. Turns out the team hoped I would know! Ha! The client had used the term, and no one wanted to ask them what it meant. (Booo, account manager.) So of course we did have to go back and ask the client, and it turned out they just meant emails to be deployed through Veeva. The real name for this is Veeva Approved Email, aka VAE. (And for some reason a lot of people call these "rep-triggered emails" or RTEs; these are not official terms.) The client was using the made-up name "Vmail" for some reason — probably someone said it internally and everyone thought it was cute — and the agency team just assumed that was a real thing. This reminds me I need to finish my article on how to tell a client we don't know something while still looking smart and confident; an invaluable skill.
"Popup" versus "overlay" versus "modal" versus "lightbox"
Updating this article in 2024: this one is much less relevant now. "Popup" is victorious.
In the early days of the web, popups were a very specific thing that pretty much doesn't exist anymore: they were an actual new browser window that popped up in front of your current browser window. We're talking like pre-2015. They were often used to serve ads. Same as pop-unders; remember those? Both pop-ups and pop-unders were insidious garbage and so the browser companies started blocking them; we basically don't see them anymore, at least not on reputable websites.
So, back in the day, a lot of people used "popup" when what they meant was "overlay." An overlay is not a separate browser window, but rather just a box of content that appears within your current browser window, eclipsing some of the content. We see these all the time, often with a little "X" button to close them. So, technically this is an overlay, not a true popup, but because true popups don't really exist anymore, it's not really a big deal to call an overlay a popup. Like I said, the term "popup" has totally won. I've learned to stop being annoyed by it.
Also going back to that pre-2015 era, the terms "modal" and "lightbox" were both used sometimes to describe an overlay. So all three of those terms are basically interchangeable. But no one really says modal or lightbox anymore.
Note: I used to hear a lot of colleagues pronounce "modal" wrong, and it really drove me crazy. They'd say it like "mo-DAL." It should rhyme with total; MO-dul. Not mo-DAL. As in, related to a mode.
Last up is "lightbox"; this term comes from photography, which is long story, and not important (but pretty neat if you ever get to mess with real slides on a real lightbox!). I haven't heard anyone call an overlay a lightbox in a long time.
So going forward, it's fine to call any kind of popup a popup.
Moving on, here's a weirdly specific one:
"OTF email"
I'm surprised at how often I hear people refer to an OFT (Outlook file template) email as an "OTF email." I honestly have no idea why this one is so prevalent — you don't hear other three-letter extensions get rearranged like this, like... JGP, or M4P. I've only ever heard it happen with this one. Of course, OTF is a common font file type, so maybe people have heard that before (like particularly art folks) and just get confused.
Forward slash versus back slash
People say these wrong all the time, particularly when they're speaking out loud and spelling out a url.
This is a forward slash: /
And this is a back slash: \
A handy tip to keep them straight is to think about typing on your keyboard, and how the characters flow out to the right; imagine they're walking in that direction. If a character were to fall forward, it would lean to the right. And if it were to fall backward, it would lean to the left.
How often do we even use back slash? Not very often; maybe not ever? (Except in code, but it's not devs whom I hear making this mistake.) So you can always assume forward slash is the one you want to say.
Ancient terms
As I mentioned, this is a very old article that I'm updating in 2024. The following terms are much less relevant, preserved here for prosperity.
"Out of the box" / "outside the box"
We don't hear either of these very often anymore, but in my early days of working on the web — early 2000s — both were pretty common, and they meant two completely separate things, but people swapped them all the time. Back then, everyone was talking about coming up with an idea that's "outside the box," meaning original and groundbreaking — I'm not stuck in your little box, man! At the same time, in tech, "out of the box" meant the same thing as "off the shelf." As in: we'll implement a simple, off the shelf / out of the box solution. So while "out of the box" and "outside the box" aren't true opposites, one means brilliant and creative, and the other means standard and cookie-cutter. This could lead to some real semantic confusion, and make us look bad.
Last but not least, my ancient version of this article had a thing about "java" and "javascript" and how often people erroneously switched the two, but we barely ever hear about java anymore so this isn't really an issue.
That's all for now! Let's all make an effort to talk like pros who inspire our clients' confidence!
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.