The use of light or dark objects positioned over colourful backgrounds. Blurred backdrops allow bright colours to come through and convey a sense of frosted glass.
The typographic term for the dot above the letters 'i' and 'j'.
A pixel, or a picture element, is the smallest addressable element in a display device.
A well-known cognitive psychologist's principle that says that the time it takes to make a decision varies logarithmically according to the number of choices. As more options are presented, more decision time is required due to the mental work of comparing and contrasting each potential option.
A concept used in systems design to describe the negative consequences of making seemingly innocuous design changes. Shorthand for a product's delayed but inevitable need to be reworked due to earlier, seemingly trivial decisions not having been fully thought through in the original release.
Designers incur this "debt" by making quick and easy choices that save time in the present but cause more complex problems later on down the road when it becomes necessary to change or add something.
A quick and rough sketch of what you are about to work on. Good for getting the ideas out of your head and onto the page while you're still in that creative phase.
A digital image captured by a digital camera or scanner that has not been processed in any way by the camera software.
A file format that supports both static and animated images. It is a popular file format on the internet and social media due to its wide colour support, portability, and animating capabilities.
A printing press that uses movable type and punches to make impressions on paper.
The main text of an advertisement or editorial as opposed to headings and subheadings.
A prediction model used in human-computer interaction. It states that the time required to move to a target area rapidly increases as the distance to the target increases. The law was proposed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist, in 1954 as a mathematical model of movement with limited cognitive capacity.
Fitts hypothesized that one would quickly select its first apparent target when reaching for an object before considering alternatives — a phenomenon called "target fixation." This tendency would increase progressively with increased distance between the subject and object until it eventually became exponential (i.e., too far away).