Color: A "color wheel" is made up of yellow, orange, red, purple, violet, blue, blue-green, green (think rainbow in the natural world) and the theory of using color grows from there. (Oh relax, students, this is a theory most folks enjoy!)

Color gets “mixed” differently, primarily depending on whether an item is analog or digital. (And, we're going to leave mixing paint for analog work to the folks at your neighborhood home improvement story.)

There are two important color modes a digital content creator should understand: RGB (for digital or presentation displays) and CMYK (for art which will be commercially printed on paper).

Within the RGB mode, it’s also critical for a content creator to understand hex code colors and how to assign or find their values.

Analog: Not involving use of computer (digital) technology.

Assets: In the case of page design or video editing, there may also be known as building blocks or elements (such as text, images, audio, etc.).

Balance and alignment: assets or elements on the work are balanced (nothing looks like it will not "fall off" the piece) and aligned (such as the horizon).

Chunking: Refers to grouping items so they're easy to remember, such as this (800) 867-5309, rather than this 8008675309; (Don't call that number, do enjoy the song).

Constraints: Limitations that need to be considered. Commonly for design, these refer to issues like space (too much content for a page?), orientation (will a consumer look at it on a mounted TV or a letter-sized piece of paper or what?), and resources (money, time, skills with an application or software, hardware required to produce the content, etc.).

Contrast: In its simplest description, it is the use of light and dark or bold and thin in the case of weight.

Digital: Involving the use of computer technology.

Emphasis: often listed as the first principle of design, emphasis refers to a focal point or the order of importance of each element in the piece.

Fixed: In design jargon this most often refers to design that will not change in size, such as a printed page or old-school website. Its opposite is responsive design.

Fluid Design: Similar to responsive and adaptive design, fluid design is not reliant on fixed unit sizes, such as grids. Rather, it calculates the same percentage of space so that content fills the space no matter the size of the viewing screen.

Hierarchy (aka Visual Hierarchy): the most important information should be found at the top or as a focal point below which all else falls.

Kerning: The space between pairs of letters in a word.

Leading: The space between the lines of type in the text (top and bottom).

Lines: either straight or curved, form the basis of vector imagery.

Patterns: Repeatable patterns, contained in 1:1 aspect ratio (squares), such as the background element of the slides in the video's thumbnail.

Pixel: A tiny square area of light on a display screen. Color variations and arrays of pixels allow an image to appear on the screen. Learn more at Wikipedia.

Proportion: The visual size and "weight" of the elements as they are combined in a work (goes with terms like balance, alignment, harmony, scale).

Repetition: Repeatable elements help create identity and are easier for consumers to remember once recognized. Typestyles, colors, images, sounds, combinations of words or phrases, shapes, are all elements that can be used in repetition. Repetition helps brand an entity.

Responsive Design: In design jargon this most often refers to a website design that is flexible in size, depending on the device the user is viewing the page. Its opposite is fixed design. This differs from "Adaptive" web design (AWD) in that AWD detects the screen size and then pulls an appropriate static layout from a programmed set of options. Like responsive design a fixed unit size (such as a grid) helps a designer plan for various screen sizes.

Shapes: Any two dimensional area, or geometric figure, with a recognizable contour or boundary. These enclosed objects that can be created by lines or fills (black, white, or color) that define the edges of the shape.

Textures: The surface look of an object, created in a digital work by varying light and dark areas. These may involve patterns, created using either raster or vector graphics.

Tracking: Overall spacing between letters in text. (Where kerning refers to pairs of letters (such as "Th"), tracking is the space between complete lines of text.)

White space: The absence of content in any design. While that might sound like it means that it's "nothing" the opposite is usually true: Effective use of white space within a design becomes, itself, a design element that provides a visual pause. A good designer uses white space to provide a pause in the art, to help direct focus and emphasis, and to help organize or "chunk" information.

The best designers live by the mantra "white space is our friend" (which is a quote this author has lived with for so many years its original attribution is impossible).

Using images or elements like animation and video in any file type tends to increase the file size of that document.

"Second, images can also be a culprit. The overall resolution and bit-depth of an image can directly impact the overall file size — especially if you’re using color images with high resolution" Adobe (retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/how-to/why-is-pdf-so-big.html# on May 23, 2023). See the link to learn more.

If your file sizes are quite bloated, there is a high probability that image resolution is at the core of the problem.

Let's say you're asked to design digital trading cards for a sports team. Here's a process for doing that:

1. Set the size for the digital cards, let's say it'll be an 512 pixel x 512 pixel (so, 1:1 aspect ratio) design.
2. Create the square design background (maybe using a pattern, texture or action image).
3. Determine where the typography will go that has all the players names and numbers on it.
4. Get the design approved before duplicating and creating all of the cards.

Good process, except, what if you get to a name that is exceptionally long?

Before designing something you need to know what the longest and shortest elements might be.

Let's add this to our process:

1. Set the size for the digital cards, let's say it'll be an 512 pixel x 512 pixel (so, 1:1 aspect ratio) design.
2. Create the square design background (maybe using a pattern, texture or action image).
3. Determine where the typography will go that has all the players names and numbers on it.
4. Find the roster and look for all the names and numbers that will go on the cards. Use the longest and shortest in copies of your design to see if the card still looks good.
5. Get the design approved before duplicating and creating all of the cards.

This concept also works for things like considering whether images need to be landscape (horizontal) or portrait (vertical).

Wikipedia (2023) defines typography as:
"… the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning)" (Wikipedia. Retrieved May 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography).

There are several excellent websites (and businesses) which offer information regarding typography. Here are two of them, the first a free online tutorial from Jotform and the game from Type Connection that allows a user to pair styles as they learn more.