Design Glossary

Eye-Tracking

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.

Fishbone Diagram

Also known as an Ishikawa diagram, is a widely used technique in project management. The diagram provides a means of evaluating the cause-and-effect relationship between the various activities necessary for completing a project by visualising all activities in the project as bones that interconnect on an anterior and posterior spine, with causality flowing from one to another.

Fitts' Law

A prediction model used in human-computer interaction. It states that the time required to move to a target area rapidly increases as the distance to the target increases. The law was proposed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist, in 1954 as a mathematical model of movement with limited cognitive capacity.

Fitts hypothesized that one would quickly select its first apparent target when reaching for an object before considering alternatives — a phenomenon called "target fixation." This tendency would increase progressively with increased distance between the subject and object until it eventually became exponential (i.e., too far away).

Flat Design

A design style first introduced by Microsoft Design Language based on minimalism and simplicity. This newer trend focuses on reducing nonsensical designs and makes the content more accessible for all users.

In this way of designing, fewer elements are used to create shapes and less emphasis on gradients and textures. This modern trend moves away from skeuomorphism. Instead, it focuses on a realistic view or illustration with buttons and icons appearing flat with no shadows.

Foil Stamping

The process of applying a thin layer of foil to paper coated with adhesive on one side.

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.

Font Colour

Also known as text colour, is a visible attribute of text determined by the combination of text and background colour.

Font Size

A measure of the height of a set of text on an element.

Font Style

Designers and developers use font styles to denote differences in meaning between two or more words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or blocks of text. Typical font styles in CSS and web development are normal, italic, oblique and inherit.

Font Type

Most typefaces are classified into one of five basic classifications: serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, and display.

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