System Font

A type of font that comes pre-installed in an operating system.

More terms you might want to know

Colour Theory

The study of how colours are related to one another. It is about how we see colour, mix and modify it (according to our needs), and put colour together to achieve the desired mood or atmosphere.

Readability

A measure of the ease of understanding text.

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.

PNG Image

A PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file is a bitmap image format that has been designed to store images with an alpha channel. This format is primarily used for transparency so that it can be placed over other graphics in many design applications.

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.

Logotype

The typographic presentation of a company's name in a stylized form.

Thumbnail

A small, non-preview image that accompanies a larger image. It provides an immediate sense of the content while not necessarily revealing it in its entire scope.

Composition

An organised arrangement of elements used for a particular purpose, such as to create striking visual effects or to convey information effectively. Good composition is achieved through different methods, such as placing figures or objects in a scene, revising and simplifying lines and shapes that make up a figure, and arranging multiple figures or objects into meaningful relationships.

Small Caps

Small uppercase letters, generally about half as tall as regular uppercase letters.

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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