What is white space in design?

White space, also called negative space, is the empty area on a slide around and between its elements: the margins, the gaps between text blocks and the room around a chart or picture. It does not have to be white. Its job is to separate, group and emphasize. Items that sit close together read as one unit, and an element with room around it reads as important.

How to use it#

1. Set one outer margin and keep it. Every slide uses the same margin, and nothing sits inside it.
2. Group with distance. Put related items close together and unrelated items apart. Remove borders and divider lines first, because space does the same job.
3. Cut before you shrink. When a slide is too full, remove content or split the slide instead of reducing the font size.
4. Give the key element the most room. The element with the most space around it is the one the eye reads first.
5. Keep spacing consistent. Equal items get equal gaps, and the distance between title and body is the same on every slide.

Typical mistakes#

• Filling every gap. Empty space is not wasted space. It is part of the design, and a slide with plenty of it is not unfinished.
• Shrinking text to fit more. Small text on a crowded slide is read by almost nobody.
• Uneven gaps. Small differences look like mistakes, because the eye notices misalignment sooner than emptiness.
• Treating read-ahead slides like presented ones. Slides that people read, such as a pre-read or a report page, can carry more content than slides that are presented. Even there, grouping with space beats grouping with boxes.

Related terms#

White space is one of the tools of visual hierarchy. The slide layout sets how the room is divided. The data-ink ratio applies the same thinking to charts: remove what carries no information. Crowding often comes from long lists, which the bullet point entry covers. For general rules about slide density, see the guide to presentation rules.