How to Effectively Use White Space in Web Design

Andy Zenner
Bootcamp
Published in
4 min readNov 18, 2022

Every designer has heard about using whitespace in their designs. Whether a new designer or an experienced one, whitespace is a crucial design principle every designer should use.

White space can help improve the user interface of your designs and the user experience. If you haven’t thought about how you can use whitespace in your designs, then we are here to help. This article will examine whitespace, why it’s essential, and how you can use it in web design.

By Seth Waite on Flickr
By Seth Waite on Flickr

What Is Whitespace?

Whitespace is the space in your designs that isn’t being used. It can be called negative space and doesn’t need to be white. It is all about leaving space between the different elements in your designs to make the design less cluttered and easier to use. The design elements include typography, images, icons, etc.

You don’t want your website or application to be difficult to navigate. This is how you lose users and ensure they don’t come back. Whitespace can help you fix this problem. If you want to improve the user experience, then you need to use whitespace in all your designs.

Why You Need To Use Whitespace In Your Web Designs

1. You Can Create Attractive User Interfaces

Users who access your website must feel instantly comfortable with the user interface. They need to look around and understand the different parts of your website and what they do. If this isn’t the case, you must make those changes quickly.

It would help if you looked at whitespace examples in web design to help you understand what your web design can look like. For example, look at the Google homepage. There isn’t anything on the page that doesn’t need to be there. It gets to the point, and there is lots of white space between the important elements. This makes it easier for users to focus on what’s important and ignore everything else they don’t need to look at.

Google, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Google, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2. Helps With the Organization Of Information In Your Web Design

If there is a lot of content on your website, then you need to organize it. Whitespace can be used to help with this organization. You can separate and group design elements to help the user understand they are related. Doing this will make it easier for people to navigate around your website or application and find what they are looking for much faster.

3. Highlight Call To Actions For Users

If you want to convert users of your website or application into customers, then you can use whitespace to highlight important parts of your website that people should focus on. This will help focus the user’s attention on those areas.

How To Use Whitespace In Web Design

1. Improve The Structure Of Your Content

When whitespace is used correctly, you can easily structure your content to make it easier for users to interact with your website. You can place related content next to each other and then use whitespace to separate everything else.

You can use popular layouts when adding whitespace, like the Z-shaped layout. If you don’t know much about this, you should hire a web design agency help you create the best designs for your website or application.

2. Focus The User’s Attention On What’s Important

If your user interface is cluttered and looks messy, your users will have difficulty finding the information and content they want from you. Using whitespace, you can focus the user’s attention on what is important and help them ignore everything else.

You want to remove all the screen distractions except what your target users want from your website or application. Doing this isn’t going to be easy, and the process will be different for each company that tries to do this. You will need to understand who your target users are and what they want. When you know this, you will be able to focus their attention on what they care about.

3. Improve The Legibility Of Text

If your text is too close together, it will be difficult to read. This will make the user experience bad and cause people to stop using the website or application. You need to ensure enough space between the typography and other visual elements in your design.

When readability is higher, the user experience will be improved.

4. Creating Attractive User Interfaces

Designers can use whitespace to improve the design of their websites and applications. There are many practical reasons why whitespace needs to be used in designs, and aesthetics is one of them. An attractive user interface will encourage people to keep using your website or application.

It would help if you made sure the design of your website and application is consistent. If you use whitespace in a certain way on one web page of your website, you need to use it the same way on other pages. Consistency is vital in design; if your website doesn’t have it, you need to change that quickly.

Good luck!

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