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 digital file created in Adobe's illustration and photo manipulation software Photoshop. PSD files are used to edit images, create graphics, art, icons, images, among a plethora of other things.
The act of gathering qualitative data about a person's thoughts and feelings related to a product.
A way of developing new products or services using a process of repeated and regular refinement, in which prototypes are made, evaluated, revised, and re-evaluated until the desired result is achieved. High profile companies have successfully implemented iterative design to create effective and innovative products.
The Pantone Matching System is a colour-matching system for printing inks. It is a proprietary colour-matching system that was developed so that when an artist picks PMS colour or swatch, they can be confident in knowing what colours would be produced no matter the application.
The primary graphic that appears at the top of a webpage, designed to grab people's attention.
The process of arranging objects in a consistent and even spatial relationship. It can refer to how text is aligned with respect to its margins or how any two or more things are aligned in general.
Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.
A textual or graphical component in a web page.
A type of design where the colours or tones gradually change from one colour to another. Gradients are often used in graphic design to add visual interest and give the appearance of "extensions" or "glosses" of a particular colour.
A design or decoration impressed into the surface of a material.