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Sometimes White Space Is the Best Content
Posted on 03. Jun, 2009 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff, Prima Communications Blog
Magazines, newspapers, and TV screens are often crammed with information, graphics, and ads. There’s a good reason for this—those spaces are expensive, and the more content the producers can cram in, the more money they make—but the result can be a cluttered appearance that leaves you clueless about where you should be looking.
Luckily, that content-to-profit equation doesn’t apply to website pages. You can create as many pages as you want on your site (as long as you don’t exceed your server space limit, but that’s another story), and you should use plenty of white space to take advantage of that breathing room.
Don’t think of white space as blank areas or missing content; it’s vital for achieving a balanced look for your text and graphics, as well as for letting the viewer know where to focus his or her attention.
If you think of your webpage as a pond and drop a pebble in the upper-left corner, the density of ripples will illustrate the average visitor’s eye pattern across the page. The upper-left corner, with lots of tightly packed ripples, will get the most attention. The lower-right corner, with a few widely spaced ripples, will usually get the least attention.
Therefore, if you put your logo, contact information, and special announcements in the upper left, you’ll want to give them plenty of white space with margins and padding so the viewer can easily identify the graphic, read your phone number and email link, and see what’s new.
Skimming speed increases as viewers scan the rest of the page, so you’ll want to use even more white space to make sure those eyes land on the important images and content. If that means you have to create 10 web pages and link them instead of cramming everything on to one, so be it.
I’m a fan of “black” space or negative space as well. Just think of how hard it is to keep your eyes focused on the line you’re reading in a book with miniscule text – that’s what users can feel like as well when they’re viewing an overcrowded web page. Instead of highlighting or surrounding, sometimes space is just the think needed to make a particular piece stand out.