Designers, photographers, artists ... and anyone who is involved in the visual arts understands the value and the reasons behind white space.
Unfortunately, clients often don't.
"Can you put something in that space?"
"It doesn't fill the page - make the font bigger."
"Don't waste that area - put a message in there."
No, no, no, NO.
If you are a restaurateur, you're probably very familiar with the extensive (and expensive) studies which have been carried out over the years om eye-mapping. Thanks to these studies, we have a very good idea about how the eye travels across the page (or menu, or ad, or webpage ...)
Why waste all this knowledge?
White space gives a design, feature, photograph, image, headline, ad, room to breathe. White space, correctly positioned DRAWS they eye to whatever the designer wants to accentuate.
We all want to avoid clutter. When we have clutter, we can't see what's important. Imagine two jewelry shop windows. One has all their goods cluttered into the window. The other shows just one diamond necklace in a swathe of velvet. Get the idea? That fine diamond necklace would be lost if it was surrounded by other items.
Here's great quote from this website which explain perfectly exactly what I'm saying:
With any medium that people are expected to look at or read (books, movies, paintings, magazines, advertisements, web pages, etc…), artists, designers and/or directors work to ensure that it gets read or looked at the right way.
This means that the path that the viewer's eye should follow is carefully planned out. Then the design is composed and laid out such that it will work to influence viewers' eyes to follow that path (to some degree).
So part of the web designer's job is to design and lay out pages so that the site visitor's eyes will go to specific areas and do so in a predetermined order. Depending on the kind of content that will occupy a web page (or ad or publication), this task of directing viewers' eyes can be a simple matter or a difficult one. This is part of why good design is so powerful and poor design is so useless.
On a more practical note, a large percentage of the population have cognative difficulties - we all do to some extent. Our brains just can't take in a lot of information at one time.
In many cases, the project being designed has a great deal of competition. It might be:
An ad in a magazine, fighting for attention with all the other ads.
A postcard or flyer, fighting for attention with all the other junk mail.
A website, fighting for attention with all the other links in the Google search.
Let's imagine that you are looking for a used car and you are flicking through a copy of Autotrader. Which car are you going to notice?
Or let's take a simple postcard campign. You have a jewelry shop and you're sending out a 5.5 x 8.5 postcard in the mail. Which is going to get tossed with the rest of the junk mail?
This one:
I don't know about you, but to me, this is typical junk mail. They are trying to cram every available piece of space with information. Well, the question is, who is going to read that information? Not me, I get brain-overload and immediately toss anything like that.
But this:
This postcard would get my attention anytime.
Don't be afraid of white space, or feel the need to fill it. White space might be empty, but it is a considered part of the design, drawing to eye to the important part of the message.
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