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.
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.
The distance between two points of extrusion or an object. It can also be defined as the measurement of size.
Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.
An iterative process that designers use to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine the problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.
Small uppercase letters, generally about half as tall as regular uppercase letters.
A philosophy that companies should take a user-centred approach to design, making sure they focus on the customer's needs and not on their company's needs. UX designers need to figure out what users want before building something and not after. They must also ask themselves if including "features" will provide any value to the product or service.
A phenomenon in psychology in which recalling items in a list imposes an order on the list, with the first and last items remembered best. That is, if given a list of words to remember like "dog apple tree", people will tend to recall "dog" as being at the beginning of the sentence and "tree" as being at the end of it.
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.
A language used to create web pages, and it stands for Hypertext Markup Language.
A small picture or design that represents an idea, function, or some other type of visual concept. For example, in computer graphics and web development, an icon is a pictorial representation of a program or file type.