A tool that allows user experience designers, or people who design products and websites with consumers in mind, to track where users look on the screen. Eye-tracking can measure users’ attention and the duration of time they spend on different areas of a website. With this information, websites can create user experience solutions such as buttons with varying colours designed to catch the eye.
Also known as visual hierarchy, hierarchy is the ordering of priorities in a design. This may include different visual elements, such as contrast, colour, font size and placement on a page. The graphic designer's job is to create an understandable document using organisational systems that the reader easily understands.
The use of design features that are shaped to resemble a familiar object or thing in order to facilitate user interaction.
Colours that directly across the colour wheel, like blue and orange. When you put these colours next to each other, they make a great contrast together. Complementary colours are often found in nature.
Also known as a suspension point, is a series of dots (…) that is used either as a substitute for some text that has been omitted from a sentence or when the author does not wish to pause in their writing.
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.
The main text of an advertisement or editorial as opposed to headings and subheadings.
Also called a line break, when you want to keep the text in one paragraph and not follow it with an airy space.
The print resolution of a printer. It's a measure of how many dots per inch can be printed on paper. Higher DPI means more detail and smoother transitions between colours.
The small, non-essential text that appears on an interface. It has been set up specifically to be short and concise to draw attention to an essential user experience.
The use of repeating elements and motifs for decorative purposes. In design, repetition occurs in many ways. It can be achieved by using a shape or design element in a pattern, and it can also be achieved through the use of multiple shapes or motifs that have similarities