Dead Mail – husband caught somewhere where he shouldn't have been
Direct marketing term for mail sent to an incorrect address.

Die stamping – or at best you'll end up with sore feet
Printing process that raises an image in relief on the surface of the material. Embossing is another term.

Director™ – in control of time
Just like the boss, this particular Director manipulates space in time, or is it the other way around? It is a devishly clever piece of authoring kit that some of our very own lads and lasses use to allow moving images to dance around on screen and make everyone go ooooh aaaaah. Created by those clever bods at Macromedia.

DVD – giving it real spin
Stands for Digital Video Disc and is really just a superior compact disc that can hold gigabytes than just humble megabytes. The show-off techies have advanced the technology even further to enable double sided and double layered discs to carry ever more data. This means that we’ll never ever get off that sofa and do anything worthwhile with our lives. Another beer anyone?

Dither – um, err, ah
Banish your jagged edges with a generous pasting of dither. The automated filling in of the gaps between pixels on a curve (for example on a character or drawing). Can also be used to fool us into thinking that there’s a colour where there isn’t. Clever, or maybe we’re just too easily led?

Dolly – no . . don’t go there
Trolley on wheels used to hold and move a video camera smoothly. Why is it called a dolly then? I can only loosely speculate on that one . . .

Dongle – thankfully tucked safely out of sight. . .
. . . as code in a system that has to be present in order to allow a copyrighted bit of software to run. Yah boo sucks to the subversives.

DTP – a plea from the heart
DeskTop Publishing. Something we don’t want you to do so that we can put some bread on the table. We’ve got kids and bar bills you know.

Dummy – sucker
In the world of mail a friendly contact inserted into a rented list to enable the list owner to verify that the list is being used appropriately. In publishing a pre-production mock-up to show what the end product will look like.