Glossary of design prompts
Answer in brief
The terms that turn up in UI design prompts, each defined in a sentence or two.
- Design prompt
- On this site, a written brief that tells an AI coding tool how an interface should look and behave: its surfaces, type, colour, spacing, states and motion. Elsewhere the phrase can also mean a prompt for an image generator; see code vs image generators.
- UI
- User interface: the screens and controls a person uses to operate a product. A UI has states and responds to input, which is what separates it from a picture of one.
- Design tokens
- The named values an interface is built from, such as colours, type sizes, spacing steps, radii and durations. Sharing one set between prompts keeps screens consistent. See one look across many screens.
- Surface
- A layer of the interface that content sits on: the page, a panel, a card, a menu. A design decides how surfaces are told apart, by border, shadow or tone.
- State
- One of the conditions an element can be in. Controls have rest, hover, pressed, focus and disabled. Data views have loading, empty and error.
- Density
- How much content sits in a given area, set by row height, padding and type size. Dense suits tools used all day; airy suits screens read at a glance.
- Radius
- The rounding of a corner, in pixels. Containers usually take a larger radius than the controls inside them.
- Tabular figures
- Digits that all share one width, so numbers line up in columns and do not shift as they change. Set in CSS with font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums, where the typeface supports it.
- Easing
- The curve that sets how a movement speeds up and slows down between its start and end. Often written as a cubic-bezier. See motion design prompts.
- Frosted glass
- A translucent surface that blurs whatever is behind it, built in CSS with backdrop-filter plus a tint and a bright rim. See glass UI prompts.
- Focus ring
- The visible outline on the element that currently receives keyboard input. A prompt should ask for one on every control.
- Reduced motion
- A device setting, read in CSS as prefers-reduced-motion, by which a person asks for less animation. A good prompt says what is shown in its place.
Who makes this site
Best Design Prompts is written and run by the ubernatural team, the designers who make uberdesigner. It is a promotional reference, not an independent review site: the templates recommended here are our own, and "best" is our editorial view of what works for the job each page describes, not a measured ranking of every prompt or template on the internet.
Cite this page: Best Design Prompts, “Glossary of design prompts”. Reviewed 11 November 2026. https://bestdesignprompts.com/glossary/