A practical checklist for white space

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time white space comes up.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The checklist

• Space is what makes a dense page feel calm
• Grouping related elements matters more than adding padding everywhere
• Cramped layouts read as cheap even when the design is good
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Space is what makes a dense page feel calm. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about white space before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Cramped layouts read as cheap even when the design is good — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.