Symmetry

The arrangement of different elements in relation to each other so that they appear to be mirrored. Symmetrical designs can be found throughout art and architecture, as well as in nature.

More terms you might want to know

Emblem

A mark or symbol used to represent an institution, organisation, person, or group, and it is usually displayed on flags and seals.

Placeholder Text

Text that is used to fill in a gap in a document.

Descenders

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

Bowl

In typography, a bowl is a curved shape used to control the area of white space.

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.

Lowercase

The designation of a set of character encoding styles for glyphs that are not capital letters.

Affinity Diagram

A data visualisation tool that can be used to explore and group people's thoughts or reactions to a set of concepts. Affinity diagrams are often used in user research and design thinking as an experimental technique for generating new ideas or solutions.

The emergent patterns in these visual representations can help identify which aspects your audience will respond well to, thus enabling decisions on the information architecture and next steps in the process.

It is important to note that affinity diagrams were initially developed for qualitative research but have since been adapted for quantitative research (though they are not typically used with statistical data).

Web Page Elements

A textual or graphical component in a web page.

Ascenders

The part of lowercase letters that goes above the baseline when used in running text. As such, ascenders are considered less condensed than those used for numerals and other capital letters. Some examples of ascenders include b, d, h, k, and l. The opposite of an ascender is a descender.

Card Sorting

A UX design technique in which you divide your users into groups, show them cards with different names for unrelated objects and ask them to categorise them.

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