Information Architecture

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.

More terms you might want to know

Pantone (PMS)

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.

Prototype

Usually the first functional form of a new product, created to test a concept or prove out some aspects of design.

PDF File

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.

Font Weight

The thickness or thinness of a typeface. Common font weights are light, regular/normal, semi-bold, bold and extra bold.

Brand Mark

A logo, symbol, design, or pattern used to promote and distinguish one's brand or company from others.

Serial Position Effect

A phenomenon in psychology in which recalling items in a list imposes an order on the list, with the first and last items remembered best. That is, if given a list of words to remember like "dog apple tree", people will tend to recall "dog" as being at the beginning of the sentence and "tree" as being at the end of it.

Crop Marks

Also called trim marks, are markings on artwork that tells the printer where to cut the page.

Slab Serif

A type of serif, characterized by large x-heights and thick, blocky strokes with little variation in width.

Microcopy

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.

Texture

The surface quality of an element.

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