- Look for the white space around you.
Gather materials such as phone books, catalogs, newspapers, a women’s magazine such as Redbook or Better Homes & Gardens, a fashion magazine, direct mail pieces, software manuals, paperback books. Look at the use of white space in each. Which type of publication tends to use more white space? Which type tries to cram as much text on the page as possible? In the magazines and newspapers, compare the use of white space in the editorial pages to that in the advertising pages. Is there a big difference?
- Start with an ordinary document.
Use one of the documents you created earlier and enhanced with clip art in the assignment for Lesson 10 — the newsletter or brochure about starting a business. Select one of your favorite, nicely done versions. If possible, use one set in fully-justified text entirely or predominantly. Make several copies.
- Add white space a step at a time.
Try just one or two of the techniques described on page 2 of this lesson on each copy of your document. Increase margins, switch to ragged right alignment, increase gutters, change leading, adjust text wraps. Make a note of how these changes do or don’t improve the document. There is such a thing as too much white space. Did you reach that point with any of your makeovers? Ask friends and family to critique your documents.
But most publications do benefit from a little extra room around the edges or blocks of text that don’t look solid black when we squint. Use the techniques described here to give your documents the white space they need.
Share the best of your white space experiments in the forum. Log into the DTP Classroom and attach a screen shot or a PDF of your white space-enhanced document. Tell us why you like or don’t like your samples.
The next (and last) lesson in this series is about saving time and creating a good-looking document more efficiently by ditching the default settings in your page layout software.
Found this page by accident? This is one of 12 lessons delivered as part of the Rules of Desktop Publishing free email class.
Quotable Design
| “Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.” — Peter Bilak - Illegibility |
| Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. |
| “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” — John Updike |
