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.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a language for describing the look and formatting of HTML elements in a webpage.
An abbreviation for Portable Document Format. The PDF format was originally developed to share documents between different operating systems in the late 1980s. Any text document, image or page layout can be saved as a PDF file that includes all of the font information needed to display it without losing quality.
A set of symbols or "characters" including letters, numbers and various other symbols.
Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.
All available space (line-height) between two consecutive lines of text; this measurement should be adjusted for either ascenders or descenders. In hand typesetting, leading referred to thin strips of lead inserted by hand between lines of type in the composing stick to increase vertical distance.
The way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.
The art and science of arranging information so that it's intuitive to find, easy to navigate, presents a cohesive design, meets accessibility guidelines, looks attractive on any device or screen size and ultimately drives behaviour change.
The use of light or dark objects positioned over colourful backgrounds. Blurred backdrops allow bright colours to come through and convey a sense of frosted glass.
A way to create and test designs. Designers use design sprints as a time-intensive method of quickly testing ideas and then pivoting into designing for user needs. A designer may then take the prototype they created on the first day of the design sprint and fix any usability issues with it, which is a quick way to get feedback on their work before continuing development.
Colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel to warm colours. Typically bluish in tone, such as blue or green.