Contrast

Contrast in design can be accomplished by placing two opposite colours adjacent to one another, creating a focal point within the design that dominates the composition.

More terms you might want to know

Font Case

The way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.

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.

Mood board

A collage consisting of images, colours and text that is assembled to convey an idea or theme.

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.

Lean UX

A philosophy that companies should take a user-centred approach to design, making sure they focus on the customer's needs and not on their company's needs. UX designers need to figure out what users want before building something and not after. They must also ask themselves if including "features" will provide any value to the product or service.

ID

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.

Display Typface

Typefaces that are used across large bodies of text like headlines. Text typefaces are generally more varied than body-text typefaces.

Pull Quote

A brief snippet taken from the text of an article.

Pica

A unit of measurement that equals 1/6 of an inch, or 1/72 of a foot.

Quick Keys or Shortcuts

A Shortcut is a computer function that performs a set of commands to save time. A Quick Key is a keyboard shortcut used to trigger an action.

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