Breathing Room

The act of leaving space is as deliberate as filling it. Whitespace isn't emptiness — it's structure made visible, tension held in suspension.

Designers trained to pack a layout often discover, through failure, that the eye needs somewhere to rest. A dense page reads as exhausting before a word is understood. The viewer's attention never lands cleanly; it skates across the surface without traction.

White space creates a figure-ground relationship: the content becomes the figure only because the space defines the ground beneath it. Remove the ground and the figure dissolves into noise.

The margin as instruction

Margins don't frame a design — they activate it. A wide left margin tells the reader where to begin. Generous line spacing signals that each thought deserves individual consideration. Space around a heading tells the eye that a new section is important enough to arrive slowly.

This is why whitespace is often called "active." It directs flow, assigns weight, and communicates hierarchy without a single decorative element.

Earned density

Not all density is wrong. A data table, a dictionary, a code editor — these earn their density through function. The rule isn't "more space is always better," it's "the right amount of space for the content and context." Knowing which is which — that's the craft.