White space, also known as negative space, is a key element of good website design. White space does not literally refer to empty space that is white, but to areas where content is purposely withheld to emphasize and highlight other important content. It helps to create focused clean designs that guide the visitor eye. White space also helps set the tone for a design and creates harmony among its various elements. This makes the website design more user friendly and easier to understand.
Sometimes, it can be difficult for those who are not website designers to understand the importance and value of white space in a website design. White space can sometimes seem counterintuitive and wasteful. However, white space is absolutely crucial for successful website designs today.
Why White Space Is So Valuable
Legibility & Comprehension
White space helps make content more legible. Adding the proper white space between lines of text does more than make it look nice, it makes it more likely to actually be read. Putting space between images and other media help the viewer understand their relationship and differences.
Importance
White space is more than an aesthetic that is nice to add, it creates value. The more white space you put around something, the more importance that element is perceived as having. For example, if you crowd a bunch of images and text around a form, then that form is perceived to have the same importance as the text. However, if you put a generous amount of space around the form, it is suddenly perceived as very important.
Harmony & Balance
White space can be used to create harmony and balance. For example, sometimes heavy photographs are necessary for a design. If you provide the other elements on the page with ample white space, the photography will balance with the cleaner content on the page.
Clean Design
White space helps create a cleaner website design. Things can get cluttered quickly, as you try to give the viewer everything they want at once. This can be remedied with appropriate white space. Clean lines and white space aligned along a grid will go a long way in creating a strong design.
Trust
Clean website design also creates trust. It is well known that aesthetics are directly linked to conversions. A cleaner design is perceived as more professional and therefore more trustworthy. Cluttered designs that try to do too much too quickly are often perceived as cheap and untrustworthy.
Perception
Perception is everything. You want to be perceived as professional and high quality. Generous amounts of white space can give a website a rich, elegant feel. Airplane seats are a great example. Look at the difference between coach and business class. Business class seats have much more white space inside and around them, they look and feel more luxurious and professional.
Attention
White space draws attention. Our eyes are naturally attracted to empty space. This helps us immediately understand what we are looking at, how important it is and what we need to do about it. If there is no white space to guide our focus, we get lost very quickly.
Guide & Focus
Guiding a user’s attention is so important for a successful website design. White space creates clean lines and easy to understand relationships that help guide the user’s focus to what is most important.
Response & Action
White space can completely change the way a visitor responds to an element on your website. Visitors who have spent any significant time on the internet have become non-responsive to banners and ads. You can make sure that visitors don’t miss your buttons and calls to action by surrounding them with ample white space.
Why White Space Is Sometimes Ignored
“The Fold”
There is a common belief that there is a magical area, sometimes believed to be somewhere around 600-700px from the top of the website that is called the fold. It is often thought that most users will only see this part of your website and that everything you need the user to see must be above this magical line. This concept is taken from the front fold of a newspaper where the most important articles get the front headline and the most attention. This may have held merit in the past when all monitors where the same size. However, today we live in a world where screens come in all different sizes and our visitors have learned how to scroll down. The key to getting them to do this is by providing compelling enough content that they want to scroll down in the first place.
Saying Too Much
Your website should have a concise message and simple goal. If you try to say too much at once no one will hear what you are saying. Over cluttering your website design by adding too much content will discourage visitors who can easily find a more pleasant and comprehensible experience elsewhere.
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