Palette

A set of colors which can be used to create a particular visual effect. It is usually composed of multiple primary, secondary, and tertiary colours.

More terms you might want to know

Close-Crop

Framing consisting of cutting off or obscuring most of the surrounding of a subject, removing distractions from the background and emphasising the subject.

Kerning

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

Onboarding Flow

The process of a new user being brought in to a new product. The design for this process aims to have an effective, efficient, and engaging user experience.

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).

Soft Return

Also called a line break, when you want to keep the text in one paragraph and not follow it with an airy space.

Font Colour

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

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).

Abstract Mark

An abstract mark is a type of logo where instead of being a recognizable object from everyday life, it is an abstract geometric form representing a business or brand. Famous examples include the BP starburst logo, and the Pepsi divided circle.

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.

Usability Testing

A process in which subjects use a product or service under test conditions and report their experience.

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