Principles for using white space in your designs (and in your life)
By: Phil Cohn
Tags: Visual Design, Design, UX, Graphic Design, UI

The picture of the sushi dominates the screen obviously. It doesn’t only dominate because it’s big. It also dominates because there’s not much else there. The empty space emphasises the rest of the design. This is true not only when designing web pages, but also when trying to generate focus in anything, including day-to-day tasks. I often find that my mind gets swamped by thoughts, which can be useful in coming up with ideas, but can also get so much that it’s hard to focus on anything without a million competing ideas and negative thoughts fighting against it. So I stop. I take a few deep breaths and clear my mind. I create some white space. When I get back to what I was trying to work on, it’s easier to focus.

Principle 2: Get fancy

I’m sure you’ve noticed the correlation between how expensive a clothing store is and how many clothes they sell. On the one end, massive budget clearance stores chock full of more clothes than you could ever imagine. On the other, boutique clothing stores with wooden floors, white walls and a single rack of shirts. This also happens online: think of the website that one of these stores would have: always light on text, with little visual clutter. Designs that are heavy on white space also tend to be connoted with high-end brands, meaning they are more likely to pay more for a product. This means more more money for you, the designer!

Note that white space doesn’t have to literally mean a “white space” with only white pixels (or ink) in it. It can mean any area without significant visual interest. Take the below design I did for a vintage-style travel poster:

Fun fact: the Arabian Oryx (the animals in the poster) nearly became extinct, but then a captive breeding program succeeded and they were reintroduced to the wild. Hooray conservation!

There’s definitely no white space here, but the empty areas of colour help not only to highlight important parts of the design, but also help to create a refined vintage feel, helped along by the fonts and colour choice (also if you’re looking for an article about colour, then boy do I have one for you).

Principle 3: Watch out for hidden velociraptors

Obviously, the most important life lesson here which goes without saying (sorry for putting this so far down though, hopefully, no-one read the first two-thirds of the article with their guard down only to be taken out by a rogue velociraptor pack they weren’t looking out for). I’m sure all of you are familiar with the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, or you at least have heard about them repeatedly from people on the internet who are still obsessed with a 27-year-old movie (myself included). The real genius of these dinosaurs in the movie though, is the way they are slowly revealed to the audience. For most of the movie, we don’t get a good view of them: they are talked about, we see trees moving, devoured cow carcasses emerging from enclosures and people being dragged into cages by an unseen force. What the velociraptor itself actually looks like is left to the imagination, making it all the scarier when they finally appear in the last act of the movie (also helping to save on the special effects budget). What we don’t show can often have more of an impact than what we do.

Design works much the same way of course. What is left out of a logo design can be filled in by the viewer’s imagination through negative space. A small sailing ship against a vast blue sky evokes a sense of wonder in us. If you want to entice a user into using a service or buying a product, blank space combined with a small evocative illustration or text can sometimes be more tantalising than a page full of pictures and paragraphs.

Bringing it together: finding stillness

All in all, white space is about appreciating the contrast between things. The saying “there can’t be light without darkness” remains eternally true, and the best way to let a design shine is often to place it against a blank background. In everyday life too we need our own white space: moments of stillness, where we aren’t caught up by thoughts and worries. Moments where we can stop to breathe, let our minds empty and just exist. After all, empty space is the most expensive commodity there is.

Also, try not to be eaten by velociraptors.