Consider the image below (the red arrow was added by me, if that's not obvious…)
The heading itself is "Budget and Ownership," but there's a prefix or qualifier of "Challenge #1." Those words aren't part of the heading per se, but rather exist just to put the actual heading in context — to say, in effect, "this is the first of a series of headings."
The heading itself could actually stand alone. "Challenge #1" just…helps.
Is there an official name for that prefix/qualifier? My gut tells me…"meta-heading" or "super-heading" (as in, before or above) but I feel like I might be re-naming something that already exists.
Best Answer
According to Dictionary of Layout & Typography Terms, the element containing the text "Challenge #1" in your example is variously known as a kicker, an overline, or an eyebrow:
But elsewhere in publishing, I have heard the term kicker used to refer to the opening of a story when it is set in all-caps or boldface type or both, as the entry for the term in Glossary of Magazine and Newspaper Terms indicates:
Yet another term for the element you are asking about is strap. From Glossary of Newspaper Terms:
At the computer magazines where I worked for many years, we called text elements of this type eyebrows—a designation that always seemed very appropriate to me because, in our layout design, the text appeared in small all-caps drop-out letters in a narrow bar of color above the headline. Graphically, the element really was reminiscent an eyebrow.