Glossary
The words we use, defined plainly.
Brand, design, web, and applied-AI terms in clear English — written by the in-house team that uses them on real projects, with no jargon and no fluff.
25 terms
4 fields
0 jargon
01 · Brand & Design
Brand & design.
The vocabulary of brand identity and graphic design — the systems that make a brand recognisable and consistent everywhere it appears.
- Brand identity
- The complete system that makes a brand recognisable — name, logo, colour, type, imagery, and voice — working together across every touchpoint. It is the start of most brand identity engagements.
- Brand guidelines
- The written reference that documents how the identity is applied — spacing, colour values, type rules, do's and don'ts — so anyone, in any market, can use the brand correctly.
- Design system
- A reusable library of components, patterns, and rules shared by designers and engineers, so a product stays consistent and gets faster to build as it grows. See our UI/UX work.
- Design tokens
- Named values for colour, spacing, type, and radius stored once and reused everywhere. Change a token once and the whole product updates — the connective tissue of a design system.
- Visual language
- The recurring visual choices — shapes, grids, motion, photography style — that make work feel like it belongs to one brand even before you see the logo.
- Logo system
- A family of logo variants — primary, stacked, monogram, responsive — that keep a brand legible from a billboard down to a favicon, rather than a single fragile mark.
02 · Product & UX
Product & UX.
How we move from an idea to a usable product — the language of UI/UX design, research, and validation.
- UI vs UX
- UI (user interface) is what a product looks like — screens, controls, styling. UX (user experience) is how it works — the flow, logic, and ease of getting something done. We design both in our UI/UX practice.
- Wireframe
- A low-fidelity, greyscale layout that maps structure and content priority before any visual styling is applied — cheap to change, fast to agree on.
- Prototype
- An interactive mock-up that simulates real flows, so a design can be tested and reviewed before it is built in code.
- Design sprint
- A short, focused cycle to align on a problem, sketch options, and prototype one direction worth validating. Our brand-identity sprints run a comparable 3–6 weeks.
- MVP
- Minimum Viable Product: the smallest version that delivers real value and can be put in front of users to learn from — the usual first milestone of a product build.
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- Designing and building so people with disabilities can use a product. WCAG is the international standard that turns accessibility into measurable, testable criteria.
- Responsive design
- A single layout that adapts fluidly to any screen size — phone, tablet, desktop — instead of shipping and maintaining separate versions.
03 · Web & Software
Web & software.
The engineering terms behind our web development work — what we mean by fast, findable, and maintainable.
- CMS
- Content Management System: the tool a team uses to publish and edit content without touching code. Every site we build ships with one mapped to your real content model.
- Headless commerce
- An e-commerce setup where the storefront customers see is decoupled from the checkout and inventory engine, so marketing can ship changes without ever touching payments or risk.
- API
- Application Programming Interface: a defined contract that lets two systems talk to each other and exchange data reliably — the seam between a frontend, a backend, and third-party services.
- Web app vs website
- A website mainly presents content you read; a web app is software you operate in the browser — accounts, dashboards, and actions that change data. We build both.
- Performance (Core Web Vitals)
- Google's user-centred metrics for loading, interactivity, and visual stability. We treat them as a foundation, not a phase-two add-on, on every build.
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimisation: structuring content, markup, and performance so search engines can understand a site and rank it for the queries that matter to you.
04 · Applied AI
Applied AI.
The terms behind production AI features — the techniques we use in applied AI and in Nello, our dashboard co-pilot.
- LLM
- Large Language Model: an AI model trained on vast text that predicts and generates language, powering chat, drafting, and summarisation. Nello runs on Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, or local Ollama.
- RAG
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation: a technique that retrieves relevant documents and feeds them to a language model, so answers are grounded in your own data instead of guessed.
- AI agent
- An AI system that can take actions through tools — not just answer. Nello proposes every action for the operator to confirm or cancel, all of it audit-logged.
- Prompt engineering
- Writing and structuring the instructions given to an AI model to get reliable, well-shaped outputs — the difference between a vague answer and a usable one.
- Fine-tuning
- Further training an existing model on a focused dataset, so it performs better on a specific task, tone, or domain than the general-purpose version would.
- Multimodal
- AI that works across more than one type of input or output — for example text, images, and audio together — rather than text alone.
Have a term in mind? Let's build it.
If any of these words describe what you're trying to ship, we can help — one in-house team across all six disciplines, no hand-off to freelancers.
End of issue · 2026.05
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