

Designing with White Space: Why 1+1=3 - kadavy
http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/whitespace-113/

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peng
A decent, introductory write-up about white space. It's a bit difficult to
take seriously since the design of the blog doesn't use whitespace
effectively. Of course, "The shoemaker's children are often shoeless", and all
that.

Irrelevant aside: 'dogsfurry' can work. As someone who spends a lot of time
with marketing firms and branding agencies, dogsfurry is not an inconceivable
label for a high-end pet supplies company.

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kadavy
> the design of the blog doesn't use whitespace effectively.

Could you be more specific? My blog definitely needs a design refresh (your
quote is right – I've been writing a book the past year so haven't had the
time to design), but I'm sure you don't mean that the entire blog design fails
to use white space effectively :)

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rwolf
First off, thanks for writing Design for Hackers.

What distracted me when I was reading this post is that many parts of the page
appear to be improperly aligned: <http://i.imgur.com/77bVj.png>

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d0m
I could hardly believe that the author of the book designed that blog.. I
mean, who would like to buy a book _about_ design with such an ugly look and
feel and 1990 taste. Ironically, even the white spaces are wrong :-/ IMO, it's
way better to keep things simple and avoid ugly graphics and colors if you're
not good enough to use them correctly.

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starwed
Weirdly, with the table designs, he switches to using italics for the %s
without discussion.

I assume that's because, in the absence of a dividing line, it provides an
additional hint that the two blocks are separate? That seems to weaken his
point about the importance white space for this example, though...

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kadavy
This post is based upon a part of my book, in which I do mention the italics,
but I left it out on the first run. I've now edited to post so I do mention
it. Thanks for noticing / commenting!

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mannicken
[http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-
content/themes/sahara-10/sub...](http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-
content/themes/sahara-10/submissions/american-architects-logo.jpg) this is why
negative space is important. It can create unintended things if you are not
aware that it exists.

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burgerbrain
I don't really get how "1+1=3" is related here. With a proper grammar, such as
the one used in infix arithmetic, whitespace is unnecessary. (and missing
deliminators in postfix or prefix for 1+1 wouldn't yield three, just an error,
or 11 if there's a unary + operator defined.

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huhtenberg
For a website that is concerned with design matters, it is odd that it uses
@font-face typeface that makes it virtually unreadable on Windows.

<http://i51.tinypic.com/1jusfs.png>

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estel
I'm not sure what part of that screenshot is supposed to be unreadable?

