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’.

More terms you might want to know

Greyscale / Grayscale

Black, white, and all the values of shades in between.

Fishbone Diagram

Also known as an Ishikawa diagram, is a widely used technique in project management. The diagram provides a means of evaluating the cause-and-effect relationship between the various activities necessary for completing a project by visualising all activities in the project as bones that interconnect on an anterior and posterior spine, with causality flowing from one to another.

Font Type

Most typefaces are classified into one of five basic classifications: serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, and display.

Rule of Thirds

A rule of thumb used in photography to create more visually appealing images which states that an image should be composed so that the subject or focus of the image occupies one-third of the picture space, with two equal vertical lines dividing their composition into two.

Card Sorting

A UX design technique in which you divide your users into groups, show them cards with different names for unrelated objects and ask them to categorise them.

Pictorial Mark

A graphic representation, such as an icon, of a company or brand. Pictorial marks can be used on marketing materials to communicate the intentions and personality of the company. Factors such as colour, placement, and shape are significant in how the general public perceives a pictorial mark.

Bracket

The word "bracket" is often used to refer to parentheses and is written as either [] or () and used to delimit blocks of text, e.g. a set of instructions. Within brackets, items are arranged from left to right in order of precedence.

Vector Graphics

Vector graphics are made up of two sets of points: control points (which determine shape) and anchor points (determining length). Anchor points attach geometry to form a shape like a ball or a heart.

PDF File

An abbreviation for Portable Document Format. The PDF format was originally developed to share documents between different operating systems in the late 1980s. Any text document, image or page layout can be saved as a PDF file that includes all of the font information needed to display it without losing quality.

Hand-lettering

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

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