Maybe you’re a social media pro or a small business owner trying to grow your brand. Or maybe you’re a copywriter collaborating with a web design team to make your content more impactful. No matter what your background, a little extra design knowledge can go a long way—and it all starts with learning the language of design words.
That’s right: Even if you’re not part of the design world, understanding common design words can help you talk the talk, walk the walk, and stay on top of the latest design trends. Below, we’ll cover why design terminology is so important, along with some basic graphic design vocabulary everyone should know.
Why Is It Important to Know and Understand Design Terminology?
In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with promotions, ads, and digital content, it’s no wonder that so many marketing disciplines touch upon design. Visual content, like infographics, is one of the best tools for brands to communicate easily with their audience. And good design leaves a mark in our memory, often helping us retain information better than text alone.
Thankfully, we live in a world where anyone can create designs for social media, newsletters, marketing campaigns, or just for fun. And with easily accessible photo and video editing tools in Picsart, it’s easy to create beautiful designs—even if you’re not a graphic design pro.
What Are the Most Important Design Words?
Good design starts with a solid understanding of commonly used design words. After all, you should be able to verbally express what your designs are all about. Or, if you’re working with a Creative team, you should be able to clearly communicate what you’re looking for using descriptive design words. That’s why we’ve pulled together a graphic design terms list full of common design vocabulary.
Check out this list of design words to help you cut through the jargon.
Typography, Text, and Font Design Vocabulary
1) Hierarchy
One of the basic principles of design, visual hierarchy adds organization and direction to your creative work. It might not always be obvious to someone outside the design world, but hierarchy adds order to various elements like text and shapes. The result is a design that’s visually appealing with text that is easy to read.
2) Leading
When you’re reading multiple lines of text, there should be enough distance from the bottom of the words above to the top of the words below to make them legible. Leading describes how text is spaced vertically to boost readability.
3) Lorem Ipsum
If you’ve ever downloaded a WordPress template, you’ve probably seen that section of Latin text that fills in the spaces where your web content goes.
Lorem Ipsum is placeholder text used by the design industry. Since it has a more-or-less average distribution of letters, it looks more like readable English than “Add content here.”
4) Monospaced
In monospaced fonts, every character is the same width, and all characters occupy an equal amount of horizontal space.
5) Script
Script fonts are based on modern or traditional handwriting. There are two types of script fonts: formal and casual.
Alex Brush, a traditional script font, adds a sense of elegance to documents and invitations. Meanwhile, casual scripts appear to be created by a wet bush, featuring more casual letterforms (see: the Grand Hotel font).
6) Serif
A serif is the extra stroke at the end of letters in serif fonts. They often look like little feet on a font. Serif fonts are easier to read in printed design, making letters more distinctive and easier to recognize. Common serif fonts include Times New Roman, Garamond, and Georgia.
7) Sans Serif
A sans serif typeface is a font that doesn’t have serifs, or the small projecting lines trailing the edges of letters. San serif fonts are great if you want to achieve a sense of modern minimalism and elegance in your designs. Because they’re very easy to read, they’re often used in web design. For example, one of the most instantly recognizable san serif fonts is Arial.
8) Typography
Typography refers to two things. First, it’s the style and appearance of printed words. Second (and more importantly), it’s the art of arranging words to make them readable, legible, and engaging in design.
Basically, typography is the visual component of a written word. Typography and text layout design are things that all designers deal with at some point – whether they’re creating a font, working in UX, or designing an Instagram story.
9) Kerning
You may not have heard of this one before, but it should hold an important place in your design vocabulary. Kerning is adjusting the spacing between a font’s letters depending on their form. It’s important to kern text to make sure it’s legible.
Color Design Descriptive Words
10) RGB Color
The RGB system is one of the most commonly used color classifying systems. It’s an additive color model, which means that when you add the primary colors of Red, Green, and Blue together, you’re able to produce other colors. The RGB color spectrum is used when designing digital applications.
11) CMYK Color
You may have heard of the RGB system to describe colors. But have you heard of CMYK? This is used to describe the color in print designs. It stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) – the four colors most commonly used in printing. Like RGB, these colors can be combined to produce the majority of colors in print.
12) Hex Code
Hex is a six-digit code used to represent a color. For example, the hex code for black is #000000. They’re found alongside RGB and CMYK in most design applications, but they’re most often used in HTML and CSS.
13) Color Theory
With infinite color combinations at your disposal, it’s not always easy to pin down what color scheme will work best for your design. Color theory creates a logical structure, helping designers choose balanced combinations using the color wheel, color harmony, and the context of how colors are used.
Pro tip: If you’re just getting started with the color wheel and color pairing, play around with the Color Wheel in our Quicktools.
14) Gradient
A gradient is a gradual change of colors (such as yellow turning into orange) or a color fading into transparency.
15) Opacity
Opacity determines how transparent a design is. The lower the opacity, the more transparent an element is. For example, 100% opacity means the element is completely solid colored.
16) Palette
A color palette is like a visual guide for design work. Following a color scheme helps create consistency, especially when it comes to branding. A palette should be carefully crafted so colors work harmoniously together.
Pro tip: You can easily create your own color palette using this color palette generator.
Branding and Logos Graphic Design Terms List
17) Icon
Icons are images used to represent objects or actions, like a magnifying glass to represent a search. Icons are used in various industries, from supermarkets to manufacturing. Just make sure they’re clear to avoid any confusion since they’re often used to replace text.
18) Logotype
A logotype (or “wordmark”) is a brand name styled as a logo design. They’re usually very distinct, making it easy for people to associate a brand with its visual identity (see: Google).
19) Logomark
Unlike a logotype, a logomark doesn’t contain the brand name itself. Instead, it uses a shape or character to represent the brand, like Twitter’s bird or Nike’s iconic swoosh.
20) Style Guide
A style guide outlines design standards for anything related to your brand—whether it’s a website homepage, business card, or Facebook posts. A brand style guide helps ensure consistency, enabling you to create a strong brand that consumers instantly recognize.
Graphic Design Vocabulary and Techniques
21) Crop
When you crop an image, you’re removing the unnecessary portions of the image. Cropping is an easy way to change the emphasis or size of an image.
22) Grid
Grids are the foundation of any well-crafted layout. They help designers arrange text, pictures, and design elements in a consistent way by using positive and negative space to maintain balance.
23) White Space
This design term describes when an area is intentionally left blank. White space is clean, crisp, and contrasting, and it helps create legibility if designing around text. It’s one of the key elements of design.
24) Resolution
Resolution is used to describe the number of pixels that occupy a linear inch of an image. It determines the quality of the image – the higher the resolution, the better the quality (and the less pixelated your image will be).
25) Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds helps designers make images more visually appealing. Picture a 3×3 grid over your picture. Then, align the picture’s object with the intersection points or allow the object to stretch across the grid.
26) Saturation
Saturation measures the intensity of a color. The more saturated a color is, the more vibrant it appears.
27) Scale
Scale is the relative size of an object (or the different objects) within a design. While two objects of the same scale are typically considered equal, making one object considerably larger can make it seem more important. As a result, scale is one of the design tips most often used to establish hierarchy in design.
28) Texture
In design terminology, texture is the visual appearance of a design. Adding layered graphics to a design can help create a visual texture. Sometimes, designs can also imitate real-world textures, such as metal or fabric.
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