2. People ignore what they don’t understand.

3. Is it concise? Will it fit easily in an email subject line, a Twitter post?

4. Would you click it? Is it catchy? Spreadable? If you saw the headline at random in Google Reader/Digg/Reddit, etc., would it get your attention and compel you to click?

5. If possible, load the important keywords at the front. This is good for search engines and human reader/scanners.

6. Is it honest? People don’t like being tricked and won’t trust you again if what follows doesn’t match what was promised.

7. If too difficult to incorporate all elements at once, define immediate and long term goals. Tailor the title for viral, buzzworthiness first so you can grab the social media/click happy crowd. Rework the title later, after everything as settled, so that it’s search engine friendly for future reference and findability.

After more than ten years of Internet use, of square eyes and flirtations with epilepsy, my palette for web design has begun to mature in more ways than I would have expected. Taste is a voracious, subjective beast, never to be taken as the rule, and always best locked away in the cage of the mind…but from time to time you can’t help but let the beast out…so to speak. Indulge me a little. So I’ve been thinking about design recently, about my likes and dislikes, efficient vs. inefficient and gone are the times of attraction to the loud, grunge-type designs, or the dark and deviant coves (however enticing the content may be); and waned is the allure of the jam-packed jumbo sites, the in-yer-face information sites: buy this! Do that! Look at this! Subscribe to that…could I have become a grumpy old man ahead of my time? Is it just me who welcomes the ‘zen approach’ to design? Soft tones, minimal options and whitespace! Yes, lots of glorious whitespace! Remember William Blake in Auguries of Innocence?

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Blake warns us not to get caught up in greed, complacency and the easy obfuscation of life’s subtleties that ensues. Never has it been more important to strip away the layers and find a primal message than today. We are immersed in a culture of advertising, up to our necks in manufactured visual stimuli, to the extent that we’ve become ‘innocent’ in the hands of the people who design the shape of our world today. And so it goes, with this in my mind, that I find myself gravitating towards simplicity, efficiency and stark beauty, a sensation recently highlighted in the media with coverage of photographer Spencer Tunick‘s work, particularly in Amsterdam (see right). How hard it feels to strip away the superfluous, the branding, the economic drive of every last thing we create, and not to reduce it to nothing, but to restore but an iota of harmony, order and togetherness.

Let me now illustrate the point with three sites that I’ve come across recently. Each one shares common design aspects and in particular a strong use of ‘whitespace’. The first site was launched recently by the Arts Council of England. It is a site that maps (quite literally) the recent history and activities of their International Arts fellows since 2001. What I find most compelling is the overall visual simplicity and the flow from top to bottom in 3 column form without any lines or boundaries other than space to separate content. The second site is Amnesty International’s ‘Eyes on Darfur‘. By presenting one large image on the entry page against a backdrop of white, we are taken straight to the heart of the matter. The sense of urgency that this achieves is exactly inline with the nature of the issues Amnesty covers here. The third site belongs to General Electric Company. And just as with the two others the emphasis is on a central image that evokes a state of mind and suggests the overarching subject of the site. In this case GE is clearly pushing an ‘eco-campaign’. But if one wanted to summarize an effective use of whitespace, one might highlight the following attributes:

• Whitespace allows imagery to play a central role in the design, working as a ‘blank canvas’. Choosing an evocative image that encompasses the site’s ethos and identity is thus essential.
• Using space as an object rather than a ‘non-entity’. (e.g. using whitespace to delineate borders and columns).
• Economy of colours: monotone and duotone colour schemes are simple and most effective.
• Stripping a site of too many options and reducing options to the essential few.
• Using space to create ‘flow’. A clever use of whitespace is one that doesn’t impose boundaries or channels on the space but rather works seamlessly with the space to achieve a structural flow.