Wide Margins · Essays · Letter 31
On white space
Esme Rowe · 1 November 2026 · 6 min read
The empty parts of a page are not left over. They are the part that lets you read the rest.
Every few months a client asks me to "use the space better". What they mean is: put something in it. A second column, a bigger logo, one more offer. I understand the feeling. Empty space looks like money not spent, like a shop with bare shelves.
But a page is not a shop. It is closer to a room, and nobody judges a room by how much furniture is in it. We judge it by whether we can move, sit down and hear ourselves think.
The page as a room
1 Book designers have argued about margins for five hundred years. The old rule gave the outer margin twice the width of the inner one.
Think of the margins as the walls and the space between paragraphs as the doorways. Too little, and the room feels like a corridor: you hurry through it and remember nothing.1 Too much, and it feels like a hall where your voice echoes. Somewhere between them is a page you want to stay on.
The best designers I know do not start with what goes on the page. They start with what stays off it. They ask which three things the reader must notice, and then they clear everything else out of the way, so those three things have air around them.
That is all white space is: air. It is not a style, and it is not a luxury for expensive brands. A bus schedule needs it as much as a perfume advert, and usually more.
What space does for reading
Reading is a physical act. The eye jumps along a line in small leaps, then has to find the start of the next line without getting lost. Space is what makes that jump easy.
The length of a line
2 This column is set at about 66 characters, at 20 pixels, with a line height of 1.75.
A line of about sixty to seventy characters is the comfortable distance.2 Shorter, and the eye spends its time jumping back. Longer, and it starts to lose its place, landing on the same line twice or skipping one entirely.
The space between lines
Lines that sit too close blur into a gray wall. Give them a little more room than feels necessary, about two thirds of the type size again, and the text opens up like a window.
Three questions for any page
When a page feels crowded, I ask three things before I move a single pixel:
- What is the one thing a reader must take away?
- What on this page is here because nobody dared to remove it?
- If I took away half of the rest, would anybody miss it?
3 The client in question now sends me screenshots of crowded pages, with one word: "air?"
The answers are almost always kinder than we fear. Space is not what we lose when we take things away. It is what the reader gains.3
Esme
Wide Margins is a short letter about design, sent on the first Sunday of each month. Read the earlier letters or get the next one.