Grid

A system of columns and rows designers use to create layouts. It's used in graphic design and web development to align elements for easy use on the page. Grids are a key part of design because they help you create balance, rhythm, proportion and hierarchy in your layout.

More terms you might want to know

Golden Ratio

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.

Display Typface

Typefaces that are used across large bodies of text like headlines. Text typefaces are generally more varied than body-text typefaces.

Body Copy

The main text of an advertisement or editorial as opposed to headings and subheadings.

Font Style

Designers and developers use font styles to denote differences in meaning between two or more words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or blocks of text. Typical font styles in CSS and web development are normal, italic, oblique and inherit.

Empathy

A type of understanding that is achieved by taking the perspective of another individual. Different people's perspectives often have different needs and values, so empathy can help you understand those differences.

Right-aligned

Text that flows from right to left and is the default reading direction of a page with its content aligned on the right margin.

Legibility

How well or poorly something can be read.

Point Size

A unit for defining the size of a font. It's not a distance; this unit's measurement is only relative to the typeface's design.

Terminal

The end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn’t include a serif. Some typefaces feature ball terminals on letters such as the ‘f’, ‘a’, and ‘c’.

Hand-lettering

The art of drawing original characters and symbols — especially for decorative purposes.

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