A type of typographical contrast used to convey emphasis. Italics were initially developed for the printing press and are now widely used in print, web design, public signs and labelling systems.
Usually the first functional form of a new product, created to test a concept or prove out some aspects of design.
Colours on the same side of the colour wheel as red, such as pink, orange and yellow.
The intensity of a color relative to its own brightness. Colours are said to be saturated when they have a strong hue and high intensity.
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.
In handwriting and calligraphy, ball terminals are the end of a stroke that resembles a ball. They are also used in some typefaces like cursive or old-style typefaces.
A measure of the height of a set of text on an element.
A type of text used as filler or placeholder text. Since the dawn of time, it has been around and is sometimes erroneously referred to as "a nonsense sentence used by printers who have run out of typesetting space".
A theory in psychology that discusses the general idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's based on a human need to search for stability and meaning, which leads to organic movements towards wholeness. Gestalt Theory assumes there are inherent flaws in how we perceive forms and patterns, and it holds that this innate tendency transforms into an active process of looking for order in reality.
The word "bracket" is often used to refer to parentheses and is written as either [] or () and used to delimit blocks of text, e.g. a set of instructions. Within brackets, items are arranged from left to right in order of precedence.
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, an international standards body that sets standards for creating and handling compressed digital images. The JPEG file format was designed to balance good visual quality and small file size, typically through lossy compression. The JPEG file format is widely used as a means of compressing digital images, particularly those produced by digital cameras.