Terminal

The end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn’t include a serif. Some typefaces feature ball terminals on letters such as the ‘f’, ‘a’, and ‘c’.

More terms you might want to know

Crop Marks

Also called trim marks, are markings on artwork that tells the printer where to cut the page.

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).

Stroke

The path of any movement, mark, shape, or other feature of a design. It can be the border of an element or even the tight edge of a text box, etc.

Hand-lettering

The art of drawing original characters and symbols — especially for decorative purposes.

Centre Aligned

A layout where all the content, mostly text, is aligned to the centre. The overall purpose of a Centre Alignment is to make it easier for users to read and scroll through content.

Layout

Layout is a defining characteristic of design. It dictates the positioning of content and design elements. Layouts can range from the simple, such as a four- or two-column layout, to more complex designs like grids with multiple hierarchy levels.

Bracket

The word "bracket" is often used to refer to parentheses and is written as either [] or () and used to delimit blocks of text, e.g. a set of instructions. Within brackets, items are arranged from left to right in order of precedence.

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.

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.

Kerning

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

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