By Blythe Langley, Designer
White space is our friend.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase “it looks like we have a little bit of extra space, so why don’t we add …” I would be a rich woman. In reality, people don’t pay me a nickel each time I hear this and, as a designer, it’s one thing I dread hearing. White space is a designer’s dream. It is not a hole waiting to be filled, but more an area of clarity that directs your eye to the elements of the page that are of high importance. White space helps us design an effective graphical user interface which is crucial to the user experience aspect of a successful website strategy.
White space at the supermarket
Think about page space in relative terms to a physical space such as the supermarket.
When you go to the supermarket for your essential items such as bread, milk and apples, do store managers hide the bread behind the muffins and clump all the variations of apples into one bin for you to dig through to find the kind you want? This would mean spending ten minutes digging through the apple bin only to find that the kind you want is in a completely separate bin buried underneath the oranges, instead of on a clearly labeled display in an easily locatable space. Unless you go to a supermarket on another planet, the answer would be no.
Essential items are placed in key areas around the supermarket with open aisles marked with signs pointing you in the right direction.
The same concept applies to graphical user interface design. When items are placed on a page, with relative space to one another (supported by white space), the viewer’s eye has an easy path around the page to find the items that you want your customer to pay attention to. If it isn’t relevant and of absolute importance on the page, it shouldn’t be there (even if you have a one inch x one inch cube of space in the upper right-hand corner that you think you can squeeze some size seven point font into).
Less is more.
Decide what information is most important and allow a designer to utilize the blank canvas to present that information in a visually engaging way that is digestible for your clients. Ten pounds of groceries do not fit in a five pound bag. Sure, if you squish the bread on the bottom of the bag, break seven out of the 12 eggs in the cartoon and duct tape all the apples to the outside of the bag, but do you really need all those groceries? Essential items are key, and the rest will probably just get forgotten (and moldy).
Hopefully you walk away from this with a new friend—and a little hungry. Interested in learning how to use white space to your benefit in your latest graphical user interface design? Don’t understand why your website’s user experience is failing? Come visit with MicroArts and we’ll help you craft an effective user experience.