An organised arrangement of elements used for a particular purpose, such as to create striking visual effects or to convey information effectively. Good composition is achieved through different methods, such as placing figures or objects in a scene, revising and simplifying lines and shapes that make up a figure, and arranging multiple figures or objects into meaningful relationships.
A collage consisting of images, colours and text that is assembled to convey an idea or theme.
A tool that allows user experience designers, or people who design products and websites with consumers in mind, to track where users look on the screen. Eye-tracking can measure users’ attention and the duration of time they spend on different areas of a website. With this information, websites can create user experience solutions such as buttons with varying colours designed to catch the eye.
A graphic element that has a definite length and direction. Examples of vectors would be straight lines, edges, or curves.
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.
A selector that can be applied to any HTML element. ID should be used when designing for a single instance, such as using the id="main" attribute on an <h1> tag.
A name, symbol or other distinctive feature that distinguishes one business's product from another's, often associated with a logo, design, slogan and other items.
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, an international standards body that sets standards for creating and handling compressed digital images. The JPEG file format was designed to balance good visual quality and small file size, typically through lossy compression. The JPEG file format is widely used as a means of compressing digital images, particularly those produced by digital cameras.
A type of serif, characterized by large x-heights and thick, blocky strokes with little variation in width.
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 way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.