Kaputt: From Swiss German “Er macht alles kaputt.” (“He ruined everything”) or “Jetzt isch alles kaputt” (“It’s all broken now”). Used to express frustration over clients who change the design spec mid-project. Sometimes clients make it Kaputt by becoming armchair designers themselves with instructions like “make it bigger”, “move it a bit to the left”, “widen the columns” etc. Non-designers: If you are not a designer, you are not a designer. Designers: Explain, don’t complain.

Kentucky Box: A set of compactly arranged form fields that just fits well between other Containers. Borrowed from “The Meaning of Liff” by Douglas Adams & John Lloyd, 1983: “Fitting exactly and satisfyingly. The cardboard box that slides neatly into an exact space in a garage, or the last book which exactly fills a bookshelf, is said to fit 'real nice and kentucky’.”

Kitsch: Kitsch is either “what something wants to be but can’t” (Jan Tschichold), what it pretends to be but isn’t, or a product that makes you feel in a certain way without caring about its own reality. In that sense, Kitsch is material Bullshit.

Krawatte: Design term, deprecated. German for “tie”. Used to refer to a nice little decision that gives the design an ounce more seriousness and authority. Can be a black header, a specific font or an all caps title. Not to be confused with Lace.