Character

A concept used in systems design to describe the negative consequences of making seemingly innocuous design changes. Shorthand for a product's delayed but inevitable need to be reworked due to earlier, seemingly trivial decisions not having been fully thought through in the original release.

Designers incur this "debt" by making quick and easy choices that save time in the present but cause more complex problems later on down the road when it becomes necessary to change or add something.

The written information that accompanies a design.

The use of design features that are shaped to resemble a familiar object or thing in order to facilitate user interaction.

The measure of how easily light passes through a material. It is a quantitative characteristic that can be represented as a number within the range of [0, 1], and in some cases [0%,100%], with lower numbers indicating higher transparency.

The placement or otherwise of a thing in relation to other things. In design, proximity may be considered as the distance between two items in space or their relative location to each other.

A set of symbols or "characters" including letters, numbers and various other symbols.

One or more words (typically at the end of a paragraph) that are separated from the rest of the text. Orphans are generally thought of as bad design, but it’s a matter of taste.

The process of a new user being brought in to a new product. The design for this process aims to have an effective, efficient, and engaging user experience.

The art and discipline of putting together set of typefaces into a harmonious and readable type system. A typeface designer spends much time considering many things such as clear visual message, readability at different sizes, legibility at small point sizes, ease of use for printing processes on its own or over the top of other fonts.

A language used to create web pages, and it stands for Hypertext Markup Language.