A
- Accessibility (a11y)
- The practice of designing and building products that can be used by people with a wide range of abilities. Governed by WCAG guidelines. Good accessibility is good design — it benefits everyone.
- API (Application Programming Interface)
- A set of definitions and protocols that allow different software applications to communicate. REST, GraphQL, and WebSockets are common API patterns in creative technology.
- Atomic Design
- A methodology for building design systems by composing components from smallest (atoms: buttons, inputs) to largest (pages). Introduced by Brad Frost.
C
- CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- A geographically distributed network of servers that delivers web content from a location near the user. Reduces latency, improves load times, and handles traffic spikes.
- Component Library
- A curated collection of reusable UI components — buttons, cards, forms, navigation patterns — with defined behaviour, states, and documentation. The output of a design system.
- Constraint-Based Design
- A design approach that uses deliberately limited options (a fixed type scale, a spacing system, a colour palette) to make decisions faster and outputs more consistent.
D
- Dark Pattern
- A user interface designed to trick or manipulate users into doing something they did not intend — subscribing, sharing data, or making a purchase. Also called deceptive design.
- Design Token
- A named, platform-agnostic value that stores a design decision — a colour, a font size, a spacing unit, a shadow. The foundation of scalable, multi-platform design systems.
- DX (Developer Experience)
- How it feels to work with a tool, API, framework, or codebase as a developer. Good DX means fast feedback, clear errors, great documentation, and low cognitive friction.
F
- Feature Flag
- A technique for enabling or disabling features in production without deploying new code. Allows gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and instant kill switches for problematic features.
- Figma Variables
- Figma's implementation of design tokens within the design tool — allowing colour, spacing, typography, and other values to be defined once and referenced throughout a design file.
G
- Generative AI
- AI systems that produce new content — text, images, code, audio, video — in response to prompts. Large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models are the dominant paradigms in 2024.
- Glassmorphism
- A visual design style characterised by frosted-glass-like UI elements — translucent backgrounds, blur effects, subtle borders. Popular in 2021–2023; now used selectively.
H
- Headless CMS
- A content management system that decouples the content backend from the presentation layer. Content is delivered via API and can be rendered on any frontend. Contentful, Sanity, and Strapi are common examples.
- Hot Module Replacement (HMR)
- A development feature that updates only the changed module in the browser without a full page reload. Dramatically speeds up the development feedback loop.
I
- Information Architecture (IA)
- The structure and organisation of content in a digital product — how it is labelled, navigated, and searched. Good IA makes information findable without users having to think.
- Interaction Design (IxD)
- The design of the moments of interaction between a user and a product — flows, states, transitions, feedback, and error handling. Distinct from (but overlapping with) UX and UI design.
J
- JAMstack
- An architecture pattern: JavaScript, APIs, Markup. Pre-built static HTML is served from a CDN; dynamic functionality is handled by APIs. Fast, secure, and easily scalable.
L
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- A machine learning model trained on large text corpora that can generate, summarise, translate, and reason about text. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama are current examples.
- Low-Fidelity Prototype
- A rough, quick representation of a design — wireframes, paper sketches, or simple digital mockups — used to explore ideas and gather feedback before investing in detail.
M
- Microcopy
- The small but critical text in a UI: button labels, error messages, tooltips, empty states, onboarding prompts. Microcopy is where product voice is most practically expressed.
- Monorepo
- A single version-controlled repository containing code for multiple projects or packages. Used by large teams to share code and enforce consistency across products.
P
- Progressive Disclosure
- A UX pattern that presents only the information or options a user needs at a given moment, revealing complexity incrementally. Reduces cognitive load.
- Prompt Engineering
- The craft of writing inputs (prompts) for generative AI systems to produce useful, accurate, and appropriate outputs. An emerging discipline at the intersection of language, logic, and domain knowledge.
R
- Responsive Design
- An approach to web design in which the layout and content adapt to the size and orientation of the user's screen. Achieved primarily through CSS media queries, flexible grids, and fluid images.
S
- Semantic HTML
- Using HTML elements that carry meaning about the content they contain — <article>, <nav>, <main>, <header> — rather than generic <div> elements. Improves accessibility, SEO, and readability.
- Shadow DOM
- A web standard that encapsulates the internal structure of a custom element — styles and markup are isolated from the rest of the page. The foundation of Web Components.
T
- Token (Design)
- See Design Token.
- TypeScript
- A typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. Type annotations catch errors at development time, improve tooling, and make large codebases more maintainable.
U
- UX (User Experience)
- The totality of a person's experience with a product — from first discovery to habitual use. UX design is concerned with the quality and coherence of that experience, not just its visual appearance.
V
- Variable Font
- A single font file that contains multiple variations (weight, width, slant) along defined axes, allowing infinite interpolation. Reduces HTTP requests and enables fine-grained typographic control via CSS.
- Viewport
- The visible area of a web page in the user's browser window. CSS viewport units (vw, vh) and the HTML viewport meta tag are tools for designing across different screen sizes.
Showing a curated selection. The full glossary is updated as new technologies and methodologies emerge.