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

Pixel-perfect

A phrase that is used in reference to someone's work. The term pixel-perfect can be used to describe something as being flawless without any errors.

CMYK

CMYK is a colour space created for the printing process. It stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow Key (black).

Raster

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

Type Properties

The attributes of a typeface. Type properties include weight, width, colour and x-height.

Hero Image

The primary graphic that appears at the top of a webpage, designed to grab people's attention.

Masthead

The name, logo, and other identifying information at the top of a newspaper or magazine publication.

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.

UX Audit

A discipline that analyses the usability of an application by assessing its interaction design and user experience.

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).

PSD File

A digital file created in Adobe's illustration and photo manipulation software Photoshop. PSD files are used to edit images, create graphics, art, icons, images, among a plethora of other things.

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