White Space

WHITE SPACE

The Principle: White space is a design term that describes the unused areas on a book, magazine, or Web page. It is an integral part of the message. White space tells you where one section ends and another begins.

White Space Tips

  • Don't Trap White Space
    Although you want white space in your designs, you don't want to trap that white space between two design elements. This interrupts the flow of the design. You might increase the size of a font, the size of the graphic, or reposition elements to avoid trapped white space.

  • Keep Text Cells Small
    We've all come across Web sites that have text stretching across the entire length of the browser. While that might be readable on a fourteen inch monitor, it's very difficult to read on a larger monitor whose browser window is maximized.

  • Avoid Rivers
    Rivers may appear if you set your type justified. A river is word spaces that appear near each other on subsequent lines of text. It is better to edit the text than to change the word spacing on a line by line basis to correct rivers. Rivers may also be a symptom that your line length is too long or too short.

White Space Illustrated

Our Tennis Group business card below makes good use of white space.

Tennis Group Business Card

But we've all had customers who insist that everything they do must be on their business card. What if we changed the layout slightly and added more text?

Tennis Group Business Card

Not only is the above card too busy, but we have trapped white space between the information on the left and the logo. The customer might have more text on the card, but who's going to read it? Your eye doesn't really know where to look first.

Rivers

Above is some text set in force justified text. That means that the text will line up on both the right and the left side of the column. Unfortunately, that can also cause rivers — large gaps in the text that are repeated on consecutive lines.

Modified justified text

Setting justified text is definitely more difficult than setting text ragged right. It's interesting to note that justified text takes up less room than ragged right text.

Above I have cleaned up most of the rivers. I did this by first adjusting the word spacing. I set the desired word space to 75, and the maximum word space to 90. That had an immediate effect.

I still had to go in and manually edit the text. I did this by putting in soft line breaks on lines that were set tight, and followed by lines that were set loose. Never adjust justified text until the text has been finalized — every time the text changes, the lines will change, too.