editorial

A boxed note set into the flow of content to carry a warning, tip or aside, coloured by severity and staying put once shown.

An image, table or code block bound to its caption so the two travel together and can be referred to from the running text.

A set of evenly spaced horizontal lines that every line of text sits on, so type in adjacent columns lines up across the page.

A track wider than the reading column but narrower than the viewport, used for figures and code that need more room than prose.

An element that breaks past the content column to span the whole viewport width while its neighbours stay constrained.

An editorial composition with mixed column widths, one dominant lead story and smaller supporting items arranged around it.

Where content is cut to continue in the next fragment, a printed page, a column or a region, plus the rules that decide where the cut may fall.

A note placed in the outer margin beside the line it belongs to, rather than collected at the foot of the page.

Flowing one block of running text into several columns that fill and balance automatically, with an optional rule drawn between them.

The rules that decide what a page becomes on paper: navigation dropped, link targets spelled out, backgrounds abandoned, and the content given page margins.

A narrative layout where a pinned graphic stays fixed while text scrolls past it, each step changing what the graphic shows.

A list of a document's sections, linked in reading order, shown beside or above the text.

A 1920s luxury style of strict symmetry, stepped and fanned geometry, strong vertical emphasis, metallic gold on deep colour, and high contrast display capitals.

A turn of the century style of whiplash curves, botanical line ornament, muted jewel tones, and lettering drawn to fit the frame rather than set on a grid.

A style reduced to primary red, yellow, and blue on off-white, elementary circles, triangles, and squares, and undecorated sans serif type.

A 1920s poster language of diagonal bars and blocks, red and black on off-white, photomontage, and heavy sans capitals set on a strong angle.

A style built only from black rules, rectangular fields, and the three primaries on white, arranged asymmetrically with no curves and no diagonals.

A composition assembled from cut-out photography, torn paper edges, scanned texture, and type set at odd angles, so the page reads as pasted up rather than laid out.

A style that borrows print magazine craft for the screen: a visible column grid, display type at poster scale, pull quotes, rules, and captioned images set into the text.

A 1990s style of torn and photocopied texture, overlapped and cut type, off-grid layout, and dirty muted colour, where legibility is traded for emotional pitch.

The postmodern break from Swiss order: stair-stepped rules, diagonal and letter-spaced type, weights mixed inside a word, and text reversed out of bars.

A comic and advertising style of flat primary color, heavy black outlines, printed dot shading, speech balloons, and bold condensed capitals.

A print-inspired look of two or three flat spot colors that misregister slightly and show grain, imitating a riso duplicator.

The Swiss modernist system of a strict grid, flush left sans serif type, asymmetric layout, and objective photography, still the base of clean UI layout.

A page turn that lifts and bends the leaf away from the spine as the finger drags it, the most literal transition a reader can be given.

A passage quoted from another source and set off from the running text as its own block, carrying the attribution with it.

The short summary line set between a headline and the body, larger than body text and written to sell the article.

An oversized opening letter set into the first lines of a paragraph, marking where the reading starts.

The longest common dash, about the width of the letter m, used to set off an abrupt break or an aside inside a sentence.

A dash about the width of the letter n, used for ranges of numbers and for connections between two things.

A short line of text above a heading that says what category or series the content belongs to.

Qualifying text set small and set last, carrying the conditions that the larger claim above it leaves out.

Indenting the opening line of a paragraph so the start of each paragraph is visible without a blank line between them.

A paragraph whose first line starts further left than the rest, so the following lines are indented under it.

Letting quotes, hyphens, and other light marks sit outside the text column so the edge of the text reads as straight to the eye.

Breaking a word across two lines at a syllable boundary so lines fill more evenly, marked with a hyphen at the break.

Three or more consecutive lines ending in a hyphen, which builds a visible staircase down the right edge of a column.

A notch cut out of a letter's inside corners so spreading ink or blurring pixels do not fill the joint solid.

Text set so both edges of the column are flush, achieved by stretching or squeezing the spaces between words on each line.

The width of a column of text, judged in characters per line, with roughly 45 to 75 treated as the comfortable range for reading.

A space that renders normally but forbids a line break, gluing two words together so they never end up on separate lines.

A first line of a paragraph left alone at the bottom of a column or page, with the rest of the paragraph carried over.

Type set far past reading size so the words carry the layout, the headline doing the work a photograph would otherwise be hired for.

The paragraph mark, a reversed P with a doubled stem, used to show where a paragraph begins or as a hover anchor beside a heading.

The nominal size of type, measured in points, which describes the body the letters are drawn on rather than the height of any letter.

The slanted tick used for feet, inches, minutes, and seconds, which is a different character from either a straight quote or a curly one.

A phrase lifted out of an article and set large as a graphic element, to draw a browsing reader into the text.

The uneven edge left by unjustified text, and the thing typographers tune so that edge makes no distracting shapes down the side of a paragraph.

An oversized opening letter that sits on the first line's baseline and rises above the text, rather than sinking into it.

An accidental channel of white space running down a paragraph where word spaces on consecutive lines happen to line up.

A single word left alone on the last line of a paragraph or heading.

The curved opening and closing quotation marks a typeface actually draws, as opposed to the straight vertical marks inherited from typewriters.

Small raised characters used for footnote markers, ordinals, and exponents, ideally drawn by the font rather than shrunk by software.

A short last line of a paragraph, often a single word, stranded at the top of the next column or page.

The subtractive print colour model: cyan, magenta and yellow inks plus a key black, mixing by absorbing light, with a gamut narrower than any screen's.

Colour made by taking light away, where inks stack towards black and every added layer can only darken, which is why a screen blue cannot be printed.

Rendering tone as a grid of dots that vary in size, borrowed from print and used to give flat interface art a comic or newsprint feel.

A text effect that fakes stamping into the surface, using a one pixel light shadow below the glyphs and a slightly darker fill above it.

A browser view that throws away your layout and rebuilds the article as plain text the reader can restyle, which is a verdict on how readable the original was.