Colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel to warm colours. Typically bluish in tone, such as blue or green.
The design of the interaction between users and products. Interaction design is focused on creating products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.
The art of drawing original characters and symbols — especially for decorative purposes.
A style of typeface that uses a width-to-height ratio of 1:1.
Typically used on the internet or web pages to provide easily accessible navigation for users. Typically, the breadcrumb navigation appears along the top of a webpage or at other locations on a webpage so that users can know where they are on a site quickly and efficiently.
The typographic presentation of a company's name in a stylized form.
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.
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 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.
The process of arranging type to make written material readable. The arrangement of type involves decisions about individual letters and words (e.g. line spacing, letter spacing, and word spacing) and more significant page layout decisions (e.g., margins, headline position on the page).
The sum of all experiences an individual has with a company or its delivery channels during their journey. From handling and registering a complaint to ordering new products, these interactions are monitored and analyzed at every touchpoint by frontline employees, developers, designers, and product managers for improvement opportunities.