The term white space, a.k.a. negative space, may be a term you’ve heard of when it comes to design. It is a visual element of design that gives designers an idea of how much “air” a design may need to look confident and finished. White space is not a non-entity — it is what delineates shapes, helps to achieve focus, leads your eye, creates hierarchy, and yet never calls attention to itself. Done well, it can turn what might otherwise be a busy and amateurish composition into something strong and assured. Done poorly, beautiful and interesting graphic elements become messy and indecisive. The big lesson here is to stop thinking about what you want to put into a design, and start thinking about what you want to leave out.
Examples of virtuosic use of negative space can be seen in every culture and period in which elegance has been a goal. Chinese and Japanese brush painting has long used the untouched parts of silk and paper to represent sky, fog, or water, giving the brushstrokes their monumental effect. Typesetting in Europe, from the Renaissance on, used margins and leading to give printed text its authority and legibility. Modern graphic designers from Jan Tschichold to Paul Rand have used negative space as a core value, proving that the effective use of nothing could connote contemporary, exacting, and erudite. In all of these examples, the visual and typographic systems that strove for grace were aware that the negative space of one discipline could be the positive space of another.
Today, in whatever discipline, a designers best work is recognized by their mastery of negative space. A fashion house that can leave half the page blank for a single object shows itself to be more confident and upmarket than one that crowds its page with information. A website that has a bit of breathing room between its sections is more professional and easier to use than one that is crowded and cluttered. Even a photograph that is framed with a lot of sky and shadow can have a completely different impact than one that is tightly framed. A designer that understands negative space has a feel for how much space something should be given.
It takes practice to learn to see empty space and use it. One trick is to take any composition (say a poster, or photo, or piece of page layout, or your own garden, say), and to systematically expand all the empty spaces till the line between too much and too little breaks (so that it looks almost too empty), and then to put back in only what you need. The more you do this, the more you will realize how much more impact any other element has when it has empty space around it, and you’ll also become more sensitive to seeing when you’re leaving empty space around elements because you’re not committed to what you want to say. Eventually, after a few months or years of trying to become more sensitive to the use of empty space, you’ll start to think of it as something desirable, as space going to waste when you’re leaving it blank because you’re wishy-washy.
Perhaps most importantly, it is what negative space teaches about good taste. The act of embracing negative space is an act of bravery, to know that it will not be thought that you did not try very hard, or that you ran out of ideas. Those who effectively use negative space over time, gain a more serene, more certain visual self-confidence, which no longer requires things to be dense, or loud. In an age where more and more, better and better, seems to be the dominant paradigm, the ability to effectively use negative space is a sign of visual maturity. Negative space is not just a design technique, it is an attitude. Like great poetry, great music, great dance, it is about knowing what not to do, it is about what is not there, it is about the time between.
