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.

More terms you might want to know

Lean UX

A philosophy that companies should take a user-centred approach to design, making sure they focus on the customer's needs and not on their company's needs. UX designers need to figure out what users want before building something and not after. They must also ask themselves if including "features" will provide any value to the product or service.

Monochrome

Designs that are created in one colour. It can be any colour, but the whole design will range from light to darker shades. As the name implies, it is typically a single hue, with black and white also being typical combinations for this type of design.

Asymmetry

The degree of difference between the two sides of an object or system.

Font Colour

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

Storyboard

A graphical representation of a scenario, usually created and presented in sequence.

Golden Ratio

Also known as the divine proportion, is a number, or a ratio, sometimes approximated by phi and widely considered aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio has been featured in nature and art in many ways, including hexagonal honeycombs, the human body, and mathematics. More frequently, it is used in design and digital art to represent a path (or steps) one can take to achieve a particular look or result. In art, an artist may produce something (a painting or drawing, for example) using the golden ratio as a basis for its composition.

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.

KPI

A key performance indicator is a variable that measures how well an entity is performing. It's a figure that designates an individual or item's performance level. A particular company may use metrics such as sales, revenue, production, and market share to gauge the success of their firm.

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.

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.

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