Discuss: Whitespace

by Mark Boulton

11 ps.

Ruder, Spiekermann, Bringhurst…

Good to see the work of some quality typographers getting metions.

Good job Mark, nice article.

posted at 05:56 pm on January 9, 2007 by Philip Wright

12 Awesome article

Whitespace seems to be an issue I run into a lot of people, some want way too much and others want almost none. It is hard to talk to people about the balance of whitespace.

posted at 06:33 pm on January 9, 2007 by Ross Johnson

Great article. I love reading your essays, particularly on your site. I am decidedly inexperienced myself when it comes to typographical design, but when encoding a website’s CSS I find that I spend more time playing with whitespace than anything else.

posted at 06:49 pm on January 9, 2007 by Alexander Burr

14 Excellent analysis!

Yep! A great discussion on this oft-overlooked topic!

posted at 07:56 pm on January 9, 2007 by Dan Atkinson

15 Enjoyable exposition on rare topic

Thanks for the enjoyable read, especially the graphical section on cheap and luxury advertising. I hasten to question why people advertise in the cheap fashion at all; I find it strange that “direct-mail packages need to appear down-market to work” although I see that the average proletarian might prefer a lower-market advert with price being more important than quality.

Coming from a purely mathematical background the actual task of designing a good-looking website is quite a time consuming process. It is amazing how a few changes in how paragraph text is formatted can increase the readability and popularity of a specific page. A List Apart actually has one of my favourite designs as it is appealing and inherently usable.

I have found that using the Golden Section and symmetry in my work to calculate white-space (relative to box size) increases the usability and aesthetic appeal of an application/website.

posted at 09:03 pm on January 9, 2007 by Michael Clark

16 Untitled

Quoting Michael Clark:
“I have found that using the Golden Section and symmetry in my work to calculate white-space (relative to box size) increases the usability and aesthetic appeal of an application/website.”

It’s curious how the theme of grids and natural proportions (Fibonacci, Golden Section) go hand in hand.
Andy Clark in Transcending CSS, discusses the same subjects, applying margins and paddings as gutters (similar to print layouts) and estimates the proportion of the content blocks on a ratio of aprox. 1.62.

posted at 12:22 am on January 10, 2007 by Armando Alves

17

While The Economist refers to itself as a “newspaper�?, it is misleading in this context given the published form is that of a magazine.

Though we’ve come to think of the words “magazine” and “newspaper” as referring to the physical form of a periodical publication, the terms can also describe a publication’s content, rather than its format. (Thus The Economist‘s own defense of their description.) As webby folk, we’re hip to the distinction between presentation and content — and as a “web magazine,” we’re particularly invested in the notion that it’s what’s inside that matters. :)

(Thanks to Jason H. for the heads-up re: our URL goof.)

posted at 03:13 am on January 10, 2007 by Erin Kissane

18 More! More!

Great article and I am really full of hope to see more articles about typography from you. People should be educated. So far typography is the weakest place of major amount of web sites. Designers treat text as “Lorem ipsum” and coders don’t know typography, so at the end nobody cares about text.
Thank you, Mark, for touching very important, yet forgotten topic.

posted at 07:13 am on January 10, 2007 by Dmitry Baranovskiy

19 Thank you, in the name of..

.. my younger brother, who is aspiring to become a graphical designer himself and take a 2-year study for it. For some reason he can’t seem to grasp the concept of “padding” in his website designs. You know, all his texts are cramped to the border of the window, design elements, each other, etc.

I’ll definitely show him this article. Thanks a bunch!

posted at 12:14 pm on January 10, 2007 by M. Hageman

20 No excuse

Unfortunately we are somewhat limited with web tools (low resolutions, limited font selection, etc.)

The great advantage that the web has over printed media is that space is cheap … so cheap it’s free! If you want to print a document with white space, you have to either compromise by reducing the size of the text, or by adding more pages (at a cost!) … on the web, you can add white space with impunity, and the only cost is that a reader has to scroll that fraction further.

posted at 04:00 pm on January 10, 2007 by Stephen Down