A greater typographic weight than the standard typeface, often used to highlight text that the writer wants to emphasise or denote sections, headlines or quotes in printed material.
Bold type is a little heavier than the average type because of its higher contrast, making it more readable. The opposite of bold type is light type, also known as regular or book.
A term that means the smallest amount of work that can be done to move a project forward.
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.
The surface quality of an element.
A field of study that aims to understand the user experience of a product or service. Conducting UX research includes interviewing, observing, and surveying users. Understanding the user experience is important because it helps designers understand how to design a better product that will be more appealing and usable for people.
The degree of difference between the two sides of an object or system.
The end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn’t include a serif. Some typefaces feature ball terminals on letters such as the ‘f’, ‘a’, and ‘c’.
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 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 graphical representation of the density and distribution of data points. Denser regions in the image are interpreted as the data points' frequency, while lower densities are interpreted as fewer data points in that area.
Heatmaps show you where people worldwide are clicking on content to help you understand how people interact with your website designs and content.
Black, white, and all the values of shades in between.