Tracking

The adjustment of all characters in a line by moving them closer together or farther apart.

More terms you might want to know

Cool Colours

Colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel to warm colours. Typically bluish in tone, such as blue or green.

Serif

The small decorative stroke at the end of a stroke in a letter, or a typeface.

PDF File

An abbreviation for Portable Document Format. The PDF format was originally developed to share documents between different operating systems in the late 1980s. Any text document, image or page layout can be saved as a PDF file that includes all of the font information needed to display it without losing quality.

DPI

The print resolution of a printer. It's a measure of how many dots per inch can be printed on paper. Higher DPI means more detail and smoother transitions between colours.

CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a language for describing the look and formatting of HTML elements in a webpage.

Pica

A unit of measurement that equals 1/6 of an inch, or 1/72 of a foot.

User Flow

The way that a user navigates through a website, app, etc.

Miller's Law

An observation in Psychology that suggests that the number of mental objects the average person can keep track of is seven (plus or minus two).

Landing Page

A standalone web page with content intended to capture a visitor. Often, it has the same URL as the website's home page and is used in paid or sponsored search engine marketing (known more commonly as pay-per-click) advertising campaigns.

Affordance

Affordances describe a relationship between the environment and an animate object, classified as either positive or negative.

Items, such as a car that leads to movement, have a positive affordance. Things like stairs that lead upwards have a negative affordance because they will not allow for any other form of movement other than up or down if used accordingly.

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