The Importance of Whitespace in Web Design

Well, all of us are fascinated about having a website of our own and in fact few of them are even passionate about designing their own websites.  But the most important thing about it is not what is seen but what is unseen.  When you are building your web pages you would often focus on stuffs such as colors, fonts and even images but you wouldn’t notice something that is equally or sometimes more important but still remains unseen.  Don’t get too perplexed it is the white space or also referred as negative space at times.  Unfortunately, most of the people or even web designers for that matter think it merely as an empty space. In other words it is a space that could be or should be filled with contents and so on. That is not all; the whitespace actually sets life to your design and affects usability drastically.  

Before knowing how it could affect the web design, first let us know what is whitespace actually, whitespace are the characters that actually don’t print or write anything when you type them.  For example: space, tab and so on.  These are just an example and you can add more things to the whitespace other than these characters.  If you look at whitespace with respect to the design it is that space around the picture, image or even a design that helps it to stand out or even to look separate from other elements on the web page.  Whitespace also refers to the space between the text and the space between the lines even.   Also remember one thing, whitespace doesn’t always have to be white, if you are looking at the text that is printed in the black background then the area of whitespace over there will be black. Actually whitespace is the area where the designer has not or failed to implement any other elements.  

How does the whitespace affect the design, well it could affect the design in two ways.  Legibility and Tone.  When in micro level the whitespace could either improve or even destroy the legibility of a web page.  In case you have a lot of content that needs to be put around your web page then try to increase the space between the lines and put them into readable formats in columns and so on.  This could make the text easier to read.  Also make sure that there is little space left for padding and along the margins.  Similarly the whitespace affects the tone at the macro level, at times spacing around the bigger objects on the web page can make the design look low in quality.  If you look at some of the famous magazines you may see that it has very little whitespace around the images.  The text that is present would be small and more focus is given to the images.  You can even start playing with the whitespace once you are experienced with it and know how to use it productively.