Also known as the divine proportion, is a number, or a ratio, sometimes approximated by phi and widely considered aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio has been featured in nature and art in many ways, including hexagonal honeycombs, the human body, and mathematics. More frequently, it is used in design and digital art to represent a path (or steps) one can take to achieve a particular look or result. In art, an artist may produce something (a painting or drawing, for example) using the golden ratio as a basis for its composition.
The art of drawing original characters and symbols — especially for decorative purposes.
A type of user interface design carefully crafted to trick people into doing things they might not want to do.
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).
A specific set of colours, usually with a limited number of values, chosen to suit the needs of a particular design.
An element that prompts viewers to take a desired course of action. This type of marketing technique is used by businesses and marketers to increase page visits or sales in a certain period.
A technique used to sequentially present items in a list or other data set that are too long to display at one time.
Scope creep is when the scope of a project starts to grow without any agreement on how it's going to be paid for. Creep happens because items and features are tacked on top of the original scope of work agreed upon in the original contract.
Also called a line break, when you want to keep the text in one paragraph and not follow it with an airy space.
Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.
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.