Talk about lack of White Space - It’s so underrated

White Space. Or lack of. Why do we seem to have the need to cram as much of the social networking (that’s a list of ‘notable’ social networking sites on Wikipedia) gimmicks as possible on our Blogs? Honestly, I see some Blogs and it’s like a unbelievable amount of noise, chicklets screaming one way, buttons screaming another…

White Space. It’s so underrated. We nearly always assume more IS more.

Ah. Frankly, it’s all overrated noise. The human mind doesn’t take it all in anyway, we scan it. Scanning the first page of a loaded Blog usually means I’m scanning for the exit button to get the hell out. Shame, as I feel there are some good posts and blogs under all that external make-up.

I know that often White Space is deemed a waste of space. Especially if you are relying on adverts to generate income.

But it can be your friend. Use it to create natural boundaries around your important items. White Space allows the eyes to focus and see what needs to be seen. A busy tight page is a nightmare for most people, so why should yours be the same? We all appreciate some space. Space to see and focus. Your readers will be thankful in a unsubconcious way. We notice it when things are bad, but when things are running optimally, we dont really stop and think becuse the site is working as it should. That’s good.

Trust your design and your content. That will do all the selling that all your little cool buttons and chicklets will ever do.

Choose one feed or bookmarking service and stick with it.

Old thingy over at Upstart Blogger, not Robert Ellis who was the previous Upstart Blogger chap, but the new chap, what’s his name. Ashley I think. Anywho, he posted about Social Networks and made the correct observation about choosing one or two at most Social Network sites and concentrate on building those. Try not to get too blinded by the millions of similar start-ups popping out each day on Mashable and Techcrunch. Always a good inspiration for cool names and logos though.

I know, I know. We can’t help ourselves when some new zoopy new web2.0 whatsit pops up. We all wanna take a look and join up and be part of the few and not the many. When we have choice, it seems things start to fall over. By all means, check em out, get it out of your system. But have it in mind that you are only window shopping, and that you have your trusty stead working away for you whilst you pop a look at all the nice new toys.

So anyway. Like I said. Trust your content and really believe that less can be a whole lot more. Whitespace can be your friend. It doesn’t always translate that you are a boring designer, it often means you are a designer who knows what works, and trusts his own instincts, and doesn’t try to get peer approval for having the best zooming graphics and logs.

Its not easy to be meticulous with a website. Lining up paragraphs so the type all lines up nicely as you would for printed brochures is hard, but not impossible. But the next best thing is just to open things up a bit. Spread yourself out if you can. Let the content shine through rather than being buried alive.

This blog is new in design and is itself far from how I envisage it.

But its a work in progress. Opening things up will be the first task this week. More space between posts, more space between columns, more space between header and content. And cut the noise.

Then it will be a typographic makeover. Utilising the excellent ‘sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses‘ font replacement technology which can be found over at Mike Davidson’s blog. My history IS typography really, 16 years with Macs and traditional typesetting. So I have spent the vast majority of my working life squaring things up, making type look nice and all that relevant stuff. So it’s in me jeans you could say. Trying to get a website in similar shape will be a tough task, that I know. But Im up for the challenge.

So I am hoping within a few weeks, some significant but subtle aesthetic changes will have been made.