There is another important category of publication where white space is least dominant. This category of publications are common in most Western cultures. They share an international commercial aesthetic of clutter and busyness in every design element. Here is white space working as hard as ever to brand for class, but in this case it is working in the negative. So the quality aesthetic has been highjacked by bourgeois ideology, leaving the working class only trashy and inferior symbols to identify with.
White space is the key and the tool.
In the quality class of publication, white space is so dominant that even the advertising is simplified, highly visual, and heavily coded. Quality publications, in the 1990s, come as such heavily coded entities that no element can afford to be out of step. Compare these publications now to the relative anarchy of the early eighties and you can see that white space has once again gripped the design world in a new conformity. The problem however, when assessing a void, is that a void so easily fills up with meaning. Value, for instance, was represented by ornament up to and into the nineteenth century and so presented an aesthetic that was primarily historical, represen-ting status by expressing a knowledge of past styling and reproducing it.