Design Glossary
Accessibility
Is the degree to which that website is usable by people with disabilities. Web pages often have access issues for the following groups of people who are visually impaired, hearing impaired, physically impaired and colour blind.
Applet
A Java program or application designed to be embedded in and invoked from a web page or other application. It cannot be run by itself.
Bitmap graphic
A graphic imange which is composed of a pattern of dots. The individual dots are stored as data on a computer. An example of an animation that is a bitmap graphic is a GIF animation.
Blog
Blog is short for Weblog and is a Web page that has short, frequent updates made to it. Similar to a Web journal, people even blog on a personal level i.e. a hobby or on a commercial level.
Bookmarking
Adding a website’s address URL to your personal index or list of favourites.
CSS
Abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheet, a feature of HTML developed by the W3C. With Cascading Style sheets web designers and end users can create style templates that specifies how different text elements (paragraphs, headings, hyperlinks, etc.) appear on a web page. Currently, not all browsers express CSS formatting in the same manner.
Favicon
Favicon or a favorites icon is a small graphic that is associated with a page or website. The favicon allows the web developer to customize the site in the web browser, both in the tab bar that is displayed in many browsers as well as in the bookmarks when a site is saved.
Flash
Vector graphic animation software from Macromedia that allows Flash graphics to look the same across all browsers, as long as the plug-in is installed. One of the advantages of Flash animations is their relatively fast download time.
Font
A font is a complete set of characters in a particular size and style of type. This includes the letter set, the number set, and all of the special character and diacritical marks you get by pressing the shift, option, or command/control keys. For example, Times New Roman Bold Italic is one font, and Times New Roman Bold is another font. Times NewRoman is a single typeface.
GIF
Graphic Interchange Format images display up to 256 colors. GIF images generally have very small file sizes and are the most widely used graphic format on the web. The low quality resulting from compression makes them unsuitable for professional printing.
Graphic design
Visual representation of an idea or concept. The term is used as a collective name for all activities relating to visual design, including web design, logo design etc.
Hexadecimal (base 16)
The websafe palette consists of 216 colours that when displayed on a 256-colour (8 bit) monitor will be displayed as continuous flat colours. The hexadecimal counting system consists of 16 unique symbols number from 0-9 and letters A-F.
Host
For a website to be viewed by other people it must be stored on a computer server that is connected to the internet. A company that provides this service is known as a host; and the service it provides is hosting.
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language; a cross platform text formatting system for creating web pages, including copy, images, sounds, frames, animation and more.
Image Map
An image map is a single graphic image containing multiple, clickable hyperlinks.
JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group. File format for full color and black and white graphic images. JPEG images allow for more colors than GIF images and are usually smaller in size.
Meta Tag
Meta tags are HTML tags that can be used to identify the creator of a web page, what HTML specifications a web page follows, the keywords and description of the page, etc. The most common use of a meta-tag in online marketing is the keyword and description tags, which tell the search engines that index meta tags what description to use in their search query results.
Multimedia
A form of communication combining text with graphics, page layout, video, audio, animation, and so forth.
Monospaced type: a (typewriter) typeface in which the amount of horizontal space taken up by each character is the same.
Stands for Portable Document Format. Created by Adobe Systems in its software program Adobe Acrobat as a universal browser. Files can be downloaded via the web and viewed page by page, provided the user is computer has installed the necessary plug-in which can be downloaded from Adobe’s own web site.
Pixel
The smallest unit that a device can address. Most often refers to display monitors, a pixel being the smallest spot of phosphor that can be lit up on the screen.
PNG
Portable Network Graphics format is used for lossless compression. The PNG format displays images without jagged edges while keeping file sizes relatively small, making them popular on the web. PNG files are however generally larger than GIF files.
Quick Time Video
Quick Time Video is the Apple technology that allows video, digitized sound and music, 3D, and virtual reality to be viewed on your web site. It’s available for Macintosh and Windows-based computers.
RSS
Really Simple Syndication is a standardised dialect of XML that enables content from one website to be republished (syndicated) by another. This method is often used to republish news (latest headlines).
Sans Serif
A style of typeface that means “without feet.” Common sans serif typefaces include Arial, Helvetica, AvantGarde and Verdana. The following graphic image shows sans serif typefaces:
Serif
In a typeface, a counterstroke on letterforms, projecting from the ends of the main strokes. For example, Times or Dutch is a serifed typeface. Some typefaces have no serifs; these typefaces are called sans serif.
Search Engine
A search engines is a program that searches documents (i.e. web pages, which are HTML-documents) for specified keywords and returns the list of documents. A search engine has two parts, a spider and an indexer. The spider is the program that fetches the documents, and the indexer reads the documents and creates an index based on the words or ideas contained in each document.
Serif
A style of typeface that has “little feet.” Common serif typefaces include Times Roman, Garamond, and Palatino. The following graphic image shows serif typefaces.
Style Sheet
please see cascading CSS
Typeface
The set of characters created by a type designer, including uppercase and lowercase alphabetical characters, numbers, punctuation, and special characters. A single typeface contains many fonts, at different sizes and styles.
W3C
Is an acronym standing for the World Wide Web Consortium. This is the group that determines the standards for the technology behind the Web
Web Site
A web site is a collection of electronic pages generally formatted in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that can contain text, graphic images, and multimedia effects such as sound files, video and/or animation files, and other programming elements such as Java and JavaScript
WYSIWYG
What You See Is What You Get is an interactive mode of computer processing, in which there is a screen representation of the printed output. WYSIWYG is never entirely accurate, because of the difference in resolution between display screens and printers.
