How can an awareness of negative space improve a graphic design?
White space or space without much variation, saturation or high values is considered as negative space. As part of the graphic design, negative space is equally important as positive space. It won’t attract people’s eyes in the first place, it is used to support the positive space, integrate all the elements in the design and create an environment and atmosphere. As we can see from my creative exercise, image without the negative space, is only displaying a number of objects that has no relationship to each other, which cannot be taken as a design work. Only an image with both negative and positive space can compose a design that has some meaning to tell.
To adjust the amount of the negative space and balance it with the elements is a very important step in the design job. While too much negative space may result to a loose graphic, making the audience hard to receive the message, too little negative space can also result to a cluttered graphic, too intense for the eyes to ease in between each object. The usage of negative space reminds me of the most basic but exclusively important principle of graphic design – KISS (keep it simple stupid). In the field of design, when we say simple, we are referring to fewer objects, less variation and more open space. An adequate amount of white space will make the text legible and graphic components powerful. This also interprets the concept of KISS as “Less is more”.
In a nutshell, a design can never be successful without the balance between negative and positive space and integration of them as well.
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