Aug 16, 2014 / Beginner

Perennial Favorites: Embrace the White Space

When it comes to creating a pleasant reading experience for your visitors, few things matter more than your post layout.

Whether you write succinct music reviews or longform essays, experimental poetry or serialized romance novels, readability matters — a lot. In this post from our archives, Michelle makes the case for posts that are (literally) easy on the eyes.

You could write The Great American Blog Post (or Australian, or German, or Vietnamese…), but if design and layout issues make it difficult to read, it’s not going to get read.  A busy background, oddly-placed photos, and colored text can all get between your message and the reader, but one of the biggest readability culprits is white space — or lack thereof.

Let us illustrate. This part may be a little painful, but bear with me:

You could write The Great American Blog Post (or Australian, or German, or Vietnamese…), but if design and layout issues make it difficult to read, it’s not going to get read.  A busy background, oddly-placed photos, and colored text can all get between your message and the reader, but one of the biggest readability culprits is white space — or lack thereof. Whether on a printed page or on screen, it’s challenging to read long, continuous blocks of text. Our eyes can only scan so many lines before we start to lose our place in the text; were we seven lines in, or eight? When this happens, we have to backtrack to re-orient ourselves, taking us out of the reading flow. Not only do the words start to run together, but ideas muddy as well — it becomes difficult for readers to parse the threads of your story or argument when there’s no visual distinction between each point. (Remember the five-paragraph essay format you learned in elementary school? There’s a reason we still teach it! Not only does it force you to clarify your own thinking, it creates a flowing argument that’s easy for readers to follow.) If your goal is a stream-of-consciousness piece that makes the reader feel uneasy, long paragraphs might be an interesting stylistic choice. If your goal is a readable, easily followed post, embrace the white space. You might be surprised at how few lines it actually takes before your eye starts getting confused. Depending on how many different ideas your post introduces or how complex your story is, even five or six lines can be too many. Eight is pushing it, and by the time you’ve hit ten or eleven, lots of readers have given up, despite your sparkling prose and rapier wit. (And sometimes, a single, stand-alone line makes a bigger splash than the world’s most finely-crafted sentence.) If you find yourself defaulting to long paragraphs, take a critical look at what you’ve written. Whenever you find yourself introducing a new element, hit enter; it may not result in a perfectly spaced piece, but it’ll be a good start. You’ll end up with something that’s easier for readers to get lost in — in a good way! — and it may even help you think through your post more effectively.

See what I mean? That was 28 lines, and I wasn’t even comfortable writing it — I felt myself coming unmoored from the post, and having to constantly re-read to figure out what I’d said and where I’d wanted to go next. I’m sorry I made you read it.

Let’s try that again:

You could write The Great American Blog Post (or Australian, or German, or Vietnamese…), but if design and layout issues make it difficult to read, it’s not going to get read.  A busy background, oddly-placed photos, and colored text can all get between your message and the reader, but one of the biggest readability culprits is white space — or lack thereof.

Whether on a printed page or on screen, it’s challenging to read long, continuous blocks of text. Our eyes can only scan so many lines before we start to lose our place in the text; were we seven lines in, or eight? When this happens, we have to backtrack to re-orient ourselves, taking us out of the reading flow.

Not only do the words start to run together, but ideas muddy as well — it becomes difficult for readers to parse the threads of your story or argument when there’s no visual distinction between each point. (Remember the five-paragraph essay format you learned in elementary school? There’s a reason we still teach it! Not only does it force you to clarify your own thinking, it creates a flowing argument that’s easy for readers to follow.) If your goal is a stream-of-consciousness piece that makes the reader feel uneasy, long paragraphs might be an interesting stylistic choice. If your goal is a readable, easily followed post, embrace the white space.

You might be surprised at how few lines it actually takes before your eye starts getting confused. Depending on how many different ideas your post introduces or how complex your story is, even five or six lines can be too many. Eight is pushing it, and by the time you’ve hit ten or eleven, lots of readers have given up, despite your sparkling prose and rapier wit.

(And sometimes, a single, stand-alone line makes a bigger splash than the world’s most finely-crafted sentence.)

If you find yourself defaulting to long paragraphs, take a critical look at what you’ve written. Whenever you find yourself introducing a new element, hit enter; it may not result in a perfectly spaced piece, but it’ll be a good start. You’ll end up with something that’s easier for readers to get lost in — in a good way! — and it may even help you think through your post more effectively.

See?

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  2. Want to take on another irritant? Weird fonts. I went to a blog because it allegedly had a good post. I could not read the type, yellow on a dark, mottled background, in some long and curvy font with weird ideas of serifs.

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  4. This makes me think of all the awful textbooks I read in school. *Shudders* This one history book I have to keep reading has these super narrow columns with line after line of text.
    Needless to say I detest it most passionately. *Shudders once again*

    Liked by 1 person

  7. A great advice, but i wonder why it doesn’t hold true for books we read. That big chunk of text on print paper don’t seem to bother human eye much. its just our perception of taking things.

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