A process that involves assigning people to work on different parts of the design and making sure that they focus on one area at a time. This method is an excellent way to release products more quickly and with higher quality.
The most common types of agile methods are Scrum, Kanban, XP and Agile Modeling. It can often be difficult for companies to make the switch because it requires significant changes in how product development occurs.
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.
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.
A digital image captured by a digital camera or scanner that has not been processed in any way by the camera software.
The art of drawing original characters and symbols — especially for decorative purposes.
Colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel to warm colours. Typically bluish in tone, such as blue or green.
The feeling or mood created by a design.
A prediction model used in human-computer interaction. It states that the time required to move to a target area rapidly increases as the distance to the target increases. The law was proposed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist, in 1954 as a mathematical model of movement with limited cognitive capacity.
Fitts hypothesized that one would quickly select its first apparent target when reaching for an object before considering alternatives — a phenomenon called "target fixation." This tendency would increase progressively with increased distance between the subject and object until it eventually became exponential (i.e., too far away).
A way to create and test designs. Designers use design sprints as a time-intensive method of quickly testing ideas and then pivoting into designing for user needs. A designer may then take the prototype they created on the first day of the design sprint and fix any usability issues with it, which is a quick way to get feedback on their work before continuing development.
A printing term that describes how close an object is to the edge of a printed page. Bleeds are often used in graphic design for books, magazines, posters and other printed materials with photographs or illustrations.
A type of serif, characterized by large x-heights and thick, blocky strokes with little variation in width.