Font Case

The way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.

More terms you might want to know

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.

Kerning

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

Typesetting

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).

Design Sprint

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.

Thumbnail Sketch

A quick and rough sketch of what you are about to work on. Good for getting the ideas out of your head and onto the page while you're still in that creative phase.

Stem

The part of a letter, usually a vertical line, that rise above the x-height.

Stock Photo

A photograph that is purchased and licensed for exclusive use by an individual or business.

Dark Pattern

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

Readability

A measure of the ease of understanding text.

Affinity Diagram

A data visualisation tool that can be used to explore and group people's thoughts or reactions to a set of concepts. Affinity diagrams are often used in user research and design thinking as an experimental technique for generating new ideas or solutions.

The emergent patterns in these visual representations can help identify which aspects your audience will respond well to, thus enabling decisions on the information architecture and next steps in the process.

It is important to note that affinity diagrams were initially developed for qualitative research but have since been adapted for quantitative research (though they are not typically used with statistical data).

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