Don’t Fear White Space in your Design
After delivering a team project recently, itself only an alpha release 1 proof of concept (which we’d call a working prototype in saner company), one of the programmers turned to me with a post mortem comment. One that flawed me because at the time in the heat of the rush and having just presented to the client I felt it required so much of me to answer that it couldn’t be achieved in just one sentence.
He said we should have filled in the sidebars with content like fake advertising to get rid of the white space. This, being a white on white design, enters the scary land of magic - the user’s perception, particularly when we look at Gestalt Principles. And it touches on Edward Tufte’s ideas in Beautiful Evidence about displaying the information in its own right and involves signal versus noise. The more noise you put into your design the lower your signal. I believe Jeffrey Veen’s keynote at the recent @media 2008 conference - Designing Our Way Through Data - expanded on this concept elegantly. I’m looking forward to the podcast.
So my reply wasn’t an easy one and I really didn’t offer anything beyond a shocked nod at the time as the crowd moved out of the building.
I’m a stickler about content in the last year. I wouldn’t take a job without content supplied and I most positively refuse to design anything until I’ve at least seen what the client is wanting to say to the audience. The design (the entire site) should be about taking the client’s business message and effectivley delivering it to the right target audience in a clear design with very low noise. This design needs to be focused to a great extent on the business goals and objectives of the client, too. And it needs to breathe.
Which is what the programmer saw as a design flaw. In design reality, the white space gave the design some breathing room, it fleshed out the signal to noise ratio in favour of the message and assisted the user’s eye in defining similarity between certain parts of the overall layout. While there was a portion of passive white space at the lower part of the sidebar I’d suggest on longer content pages this may even have assisted in understanding the content (readability).
The problem comes down to how a designer views white space - particularly passive versus active white space. And understanding that most of a design actually needs to be white space! Otherwise you end up with a blanket of overwhelming marks and squiggles and no signals or triggers to tell the user / reader / experiencer how to interpret the page. For example, a heading is not only larger it is white spaced relative to its associated content and white spaced away from the content it isn’t related to. It has active white space.
I guess the final comment I could add, and Beautiful Evidence is a book that pushes this well, would be that extra content shouldn’t be invented to simply fill space. Ever! I mean not ever ever ever ever!!!
Design is not simply about aesthetic beauty or filled in content areas. Its about shape (form) and purpose (function). Good design provides just enough information for the user to understand how to use it and yet provides enough mental stimulus to keep them activated. Good design knows when to use conventions effectively and when to break conventions and in which ways they can be broken. White space is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal for achieving that. Give it respect as a designer and spend a little time appreciating it’s value in your work. And, whatever you do, don’t fear it.
