Embossing

A decoration technique used primarily on paper, metal, and some plastics in which ink or another printing medium is pressed into the material's surface to create a three-dimensional effect.

More terms you might want to know

Proximity

The placement or otherwise of a thing in relation to other things. In design, proximity may be considered as the distance between two items in space or their relative location to each other.

Dark Pattern

A type of user interface design carefully crafted to trick people into doing things they might not want to do.

Bold

A greater typographic weight than the standard typeface, often used to highlight text that the writer wants to emphasise or denote sections, headlines or quotes in printed material.

Bold type is a little heavier than the average type because of its higher contrast, making it more readable. The opposite of bold type is light type, also known as regular or book.

Persona

A sample of the target audience for which a product or service is intended.

Kerning

The process of adjusting the spacing between individual letters to improve or avoid particular visual distortions.

Palette

A set of colors which can be used to create a particular visual effect. It is usually composed of multiple primary, secondary, and tertiary colours.

Design Debt

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.

Hamburger Menu

A well-known UI element in computer applications. It's an expandable menu of context-specific commands typically launched from the application's main menu.

Layout

Layout is a defining characteristic of design. It dictates the positioning of content and design elements. Layouts can range from the simple, such as a four- or two-column layout, to more complex designs like grids with multiple hierarchy levels.

Pilcrow

Also called a paragraph mark, a paragraph sign or section marker, is a typographical character for separating paragraphs. It looks like a "ΒΆ".

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