Raster

Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.

More terms you might want to know

Information Architecture

The art and science of arranging information so that it's intuitive to find, easy to navigate, presents a cohesive design, meets accessibility guidelines, looks attractive on any device or screen size and ultimately drives behaviour change.

Pull Quote

A brief snippet taken from the text of an article.

Affordance

Affordances describe a relationship between the environment and an animate object, classified as either positive or negative.

Items, such as a car that leads to movement, have a positive affordance. Things like stairs that lead upwards have a negative affordance because they will not allow for any other form of movement other than up or down if used accordingly.

Class

A selector that can be applied to any HTML element. Classes should be used when designing for multiple instances. For example, if you want all <h1> tags in the website to look blue, then you could use the class="blue-text" attribute.

Vertex

The meeting point where two lines cross.

Font Case

The way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.

Empathy Map

A way of researching users and understanding their behaviour in the context of the product, helping designers in understanding users' needs and expectations and what motivates them to act.

Designers can use this type of research to understand better their users and what kinds of experiences they are looking for. And this will allow the designers better empathize with their users, making them a part of the learning cycle.

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.

Placeholder Text

Text that is used to fill in a gap in a document.

Interaction Design

The design of the interaction between users and products. Interaction design is focused on creating products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.

Problem?

Got a suggestion or found an issue with the glossary?
Let me know!