I was brought into a mild disagreement yesterday.

The client is hosting a charitable event, and I am on the organizing committee. A marketing piece was being passed around for review when one member objected: "Why are we wasting so much space? There's room for a couple paragraphs here!"

The designer replied, "It's white space." This term wasn't familiar to everyone, so the objection continued: "We could put a lot more information here. Why wouldn't we do that?"

Finally the chairman glanced at me as if to say, "Help!" I said that white space is often a good feature, it gives the eye a chance to breathe and takes the attention to the great photo that anchors the piece. I closed with this summary: "If it looks like work, people won't read it."

That's really the point of white space -- and legibility of the type and other design features. A lot of marketing pieces are overdesigned, and therefore look like work. People don't want to work to read a marketing piece, so make it easy and attractive. Invite them in.

Overloading your materials with text might make you feel like you've gotten your whole message out there, but in fact you might be hurting yourself.

In this particular case, all we want to do is pique curiosity and drive traffic to the website for further information. Designed to be clean and simple, it will succeed; cluttered and heavy, it wouldn't.

Labels: advertising, design, marketing, planning