Readability

A measure of the ease of understanding text.

More terms you might want to know

Tone

The feeling or mood created by a design.

Iterative Design

A way of developing new products or services using a process of repeated and regular refinement, in which prototypes are made, evaluated, revised, and re-evaluated until the desired result is achieved. High profile companies have successfully implemented iterative design to create effective and innovative products.

Responsive Design

The process of developing a product or design system that can be altered to fit different device and interaction contexts.

Baseline

An imaginary line on which most letters "sit". As such, it equals the height of an em square. The expected result of a baseline is to reference the height with which text is aligned. The alignment ranges from ascenders, which are the upper strokes in b, d, and h, down to descenders like j or y.

Hick's Law

A well-known cognitive psychologist's principle that says that the time it takes to make a decision varies logarithmically according to the number of choices. As more options are presented, more decision time is required due to the mental work of comparing and contrasting each potential option.

Descenders

The portion of a letter such as y, p, q or j that hangs below the baseline of the text.

Typography

The art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.

Debossing

A design or decoration impressed into the surface of a material.

Proximity

The placement or otherwise of a thing in relation to other things. In design, proximity may be considered as the distance between two items in space or their relative location to each other.

PPI

PPI stands for Point Per Inch. PPI is the number of dots per inch in a printer's resolution or the number of pixels per inch in a monitor's screen resolution. The more PPI, the higher your image quality will be as it becomes sharper and clearer. The lower your PPI, the lower your image quality will be, and the more likely you'll see individual pixels in an image.

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