The art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.
A design technique employed on websites and mobile apps that encourages users to scroll to view additional content.
The intensity of a color relative to its own brightness. Colours are said to be saturated when they have a strong hue and high intensity.
The degree of difference between the two sides of an object or system.
A prediction model used in human-computer interaction. It states that the time required to move to a target area rapidly increases as the distance to the target increases. The law was proposed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist, in 1954 as a mathematical model of movement with limited cognitive capacity.
Fitts hypothesized that one would quickly select its first apparent target when reaching for an object before considering alternatives — a phenomenon called "target fixation." This tendency would increase progressively with increased distance between the subject and object until it eventually became exponential (i.e., too far away).
A concept used in systems design to describe the negative consequences of making seemingly innocuous design changes. Shorthand for a product's delayed but inevitable need to be reworked due to earlier, seemingly trivial decisions not having been fully thought through in the original release.
Designers incur this "debt" by making quick and easy choices that save time in the present but cause more complex problems later on down the road when it becomes necessary to change or add something.
Designers and developers use font styles to denote differences in meaning between two or more words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or blocks of text. Typical font styles in CSS and web development are normal, italic, oblique and inherit.
A greater typographic weight than the standard typeface, often used to highlight text that the writer wants to emphasise or denote sections, headlines or quotes in printed material.
Bold type is a little heavier than the average type because of its higher contrast, making it more readable. The opposite of bold type is light type, also known as regular or book.
Also known as visual hierarchy, hierarchy is the ordering of priorities in a design. This may include different visual elements, such as contrast, colour, font size and placement on a page. The graphic designer's job is to create an understandable document using organisational systems that the reader easily understands.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a language for describing the look and formatting of HTML elements in a webpage.
A style of architecture and design that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Brutalist buildings are typically characterised by durability, simplicity, and an emphasis on form following function. Brutalism is not a single style but an umbrella term for architecture with a stark and futuristic look.