Thumbnail Sketch

A quick and rough sketch of what you are about to work on. Good for getting the ideas out of your head and onto the page while you're still in that creative phase.

More terms you might want to know

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.

Ellipsis

Also known as a suspension point, is a series of dots (…) that is used either as a substitute for some text that has been omitted from a sentence or when the author does not wish to pause in their writing.

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.

Legibility

How well or poorly something can be read.

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.

Hand-lettering

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

Greyscale / Grayscale

Black, white, and all the values of shades in between.

Blur

A type of design technique utilised in the creation of visuals and illustrations. Blur is used to create an impression of movement or a sense of depth.

Raster

Commonly used to describe a 2D graphic that is made up of an organized grid of pixels, in other words, a bitmap.

Uppercase

Also known as caps, a type property that specifies that all letters in a body of text are capitalised.

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