Baseline

An imaginary line on which most letters "sit". As such, it equals the height of an em square. The expected result of a baseline is to reference the height with which text is aligned. The alignment ranges from ascenders, which are the upper strokes in b, d, and h, down to descenders like j or y.

More terms you might want to know

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.

Clickstream

A sequence of user actions on a website. In UX design, it's important to note the order in which users interact with your site so you can redesign it for optimum usability.

Hick's Law

A well-known cognitive psychologist's principle that says that the time it takes to make a decision varies logarithmically according to the number of choices. As more options are presented, more decision time is required due to the mental work of comparing and contrasting each potential option.

Vector

A graphic element that has a definite length and direction. Examples of vectors would be straight lines, edges, or curves.

Raster

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

Stroke

The path of any movement, mark, shape, or other feature of a design. It can be the border of an element or even the tight edge of a text box, etc.

Embossing

A decoration technique used primarily on paper, metal, and some plastics in which ink or another printing medium is pressed into the material's surface to create a three-dimensional effect.

Cap Height

The distance from the baseline to the top of a capital letter, number, or other upper-case glyphs.

Hex Code

A way of expressing colours on digital media. To specify a hex code, you need to consider the three primary colours: red, green and blue. The hex code is always six characters long and looks like this: #RRGGBB and their values range from 00 to FF.

Font Weight

The thickness or thinness of a typeface. Common font weights are light, regular/normal, semi-bold, bold and extra bold.

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