White space

“Whitespace, many times referred to as negative space, is the portion of a page left unmarked, the portion that is left blank, or the empty space in a page. In web design terms, it’s the space between graphics, columns, images, text, margins and other elements. It is the space left untouched in order to smooth things out and transform a page into something elegant. It is also the blank space that reminds us that simpler designs are beautiful and that we don’t need to create a layout filled with text and graphical elements to deliver a clear and direct message.”
Gisele Muller on treehouse.

There are two forms of while space that the OSS industry doesn’t utilise very often, to its detriment.

The first is in our application designs. There’s usually so much information we could show, so we decide that we should show. We often end up with full pages / screens that are definitely not clear, concise or elegant… or most importantly, intuitive. I suspect this will change in time, as described in this earlier post about a new style of OSS GUI.

The second is in our calendars. As a consultant, I’ve worked in many different corporate environments. The ones where the employees’ calendars were booked wall-to-wall, often in duplicate or triplicate for any slot during daylight were always the least productive. With all the meeting there was no time left for doing. Not surprisingly, the environments that avoided meeting fatigue actually got stuff done.

But more importantly, the OSS environments with no white space also seemed the most short-term in thinking, thinking only of putting out the next bushfire. There was no time anywhere in the calendar to think about the long-term situation.

The hard part on both of these examples is finding a way to carve out white space.