A usability assessment method that is used to evaluate a design against established usability principles or heuristics. It is based on the idea that designers can use their experience to find areas of poor design without extensive user testing.
A symbol that is used in the design industry to give a more personal touch. Lettermarks can be an individual's name or initials that are cleverly designed and incorporated into a company's logo.
A portion of an image where the remainder is discarded.
An imaginary line on which most letters "sit". As such, it equals the height of an em square. The expected result of a baseline is to reference the height with which text is aligned. The alignment ranges from ascenders, which are the upper strokes in b, d, and h, down to descenders like j or y.
The unused or empty space in a composition of images, either two-dimensional (as with paintings) or three-dimensional (as with sculptures).
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 way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.
A process in which subjects use a product or service under test conditions and report their experience.
A graphical representation of the user on a device, used to represent various users in different contexts. It can be a photo, image or drawing.
The distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Nearby descenders (such as j) and ascenders (such as q) usually extend slightly below or above this height.
A type of text used as filler or placeholder text. Since the dawn of time, it has been around and is sometimes erroneously referred to as "a nonsense sentence used by printers who have run out of typesetting space".