Material Design

A design language developed by Google. The goal of Material Design was to create fluid, natural movement for users on any platform they happen to be using.

More terms you might want to know

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.

Shade

The relative lightness or darkness of a hue.

Tint

A generic term for adding colour to an image. A tint can be applied by darkening a colour to create different shades or lightening the saturation, creating a washed-out look.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A term that means the smallest amount of work that can be done to move a project forward.

Class

A selector that can be applied to any HTML element. Classes should be used when designing for multiple instances. For example, if you want all <h1> tags in the website to look blue, then you could use the class="blue-text" attribute.

Point Size

A unit for defining the size of a font. It's not a distance; this unit's measurement is only relative to the typeface's design.

Font Weight

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

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.

Skeuomorphism

The use of design features that are shaped to resemble a familiar object or thing in order to facilitate user interaction.

Isolation Effect

A psychological principle which predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus which differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. In other words, people tend to remember items in isolation more than those of a similar nature or objects in clusters. This phenomenon has been applied in designing websites and software with various levels of success.

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