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.

More terms you might want to know

Avatar

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.

Style Guide

A group of rules, guidelines, and/or standards designers use when producing artwork or branded projects ensuring that they have the desired appearance and are compliant with usage guidelines.

Microcopy

The small, non-essential text that appears on an interface. It has been set up specifically to be short and concise to draw attention to an essential user experience.

Analogous Colours

Colours that have a relation in their hue. A colour wheel can be used to help identify analogous colours. Analogous colours are typically found next to each other on the colour wheel.

White Space

The area of negative space around and between elements in a design.

Repetition

The use of repeating elements and motifs for decorative purposes. In design, repetition occurs in many ways. It can be achieved by using a shape or design element in a pattern, and it can also be achieved through the use of multiple shapes or motifs that have similarities

Raster

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

Opacity

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.

Backslanted

A type of design that features the strokes running predominantly from the upper left to the lower right.

It can also be used in reference to a type of lettering, typically for advertisements, to be read in either direction. It is also used to help the reader navigate through and around the advertisement.

Debossing

A design or decoration impressed into the surface of a material.

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