White is not emptiness
There is a sentence I hear on almost every project, and it always arrives at the same moment, when the layout is nearly finished and everyone is leaning over the same screen. Can we put something there? It is said kindly, often by someone who is paying and has every right to ask. And yet it does the same thing to me every time, as if I were being asked to fill the silences in a conversation on the grounds that they serve no purpose.
This emptiness people speak of does not exist. It is neither an oversight nor space left free while waiting for something better; it is a material, with a name, a weight, and a good number of people who spent their lives studying it long before I ever opened a piece of software. The trouble is that it is the only material of the trade you never see being worked.
Like breathing. Nobody notices their own, until the moment it runs out.
THE WORD
The vocabulary says it all. In typography we do not speak of emptiness, we speak of white, and it is a technical term in the same way as weight or leading. The surrounding white of the margins, the whites that separate words and lines, each with its own width and its own name, from the em quad down to the thin space French slips in before a question mark.
And what if I told you that for four centuries this white was an object you held in your hand? Before phototypesetting, a compositor who wanted space went to his case for pieces of metal called spaces and quads, set them between the letters and locked up his forme. These pieces had weight, they cost the price of lead, and the only thing that distinguished them from the letters is that they were cast lower, so they would not touch the paper.
There is the first reversal. You do not remove material to make white, you add it.
THE FORM
In 1915, the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin published that now-famous drawing in which you see a vase, or two profiles face to face, depending on where the eye decides to rest. What interests me in it is not the sleight of hand, it is what it demonstrates, namely that the ground is not behind the figure; it is in permanent negotiation with it.
Type designers understood this long before the psychologists. An o is not a black stroke closed on itself, it is a white that the black comes to enclose, and this white has a name, the counter. These inner whites are what you even out first when drawing a typeface, because they are what give a text its colour, its density, its fatigue in reading. The black follows. And the word itself is only a word because a white separates it from the next; remove the spaces from a sentence and you will not have lost a decoration, you will have lost the meaning.
White does not separate the signs. It makes them possible.
THE PAGE
In 1946, a Dutch researcher named Van de Graaf reconstructed the geometric construction that governed the page layout of manuscripts and the first printed books. Jan Tschichold took it up and spread it in The Form of the Book. The canon gives margins in a ratio of two, three, four and six, the smallest on the spine side, the largest at the foot.
The consequence can be counted, and it speaks louder than any argument. In a page composed according to this canon, the text occupies about half the surface. The other half carries nothing.
In other words, in the books we have considered the best made for five centuries, half of what you buy is white, and nobody has ever thought to complain about it. The same logic holds for line length, which Bringhurst sets between forty-five and seventy-five characters. What sets this limit is neither the typeface nor the subject, it is the amount of white you agree to leave on the right and on the left.
A page is not composed by placing content, it is composed by deciding how much air to leave it.
THE SILENCE
In 1952, John Cage created a piece of four minutes and thirty-three seconds during which no note is played. He recounts in Silence that he had entered, shortly before, an anechoic chamber designed to absorb the slightest sound, and that he had still heard two noises there, one high and one low. His conclusion, which he repeated all his life: absolute silence does not exist, and what we take for silence is simply sound we had not decided to listen to.
Replace sound with image and you have exactly my subject.
THE PRICE
There remains the real reason I am asked to fill. It is neither aesthetic nor theoretical, it is economic.
In the printed press, advertising space is bought by surface. The white you leave inside it, you have paid for at the same rate as the rest; you have therefore paid to put nothing there, and that is exactly what made white a sign of luxury. It does not cost more to produce, it costs more to leave.
The screen made the reflex even stronger, all the stronger because surface there became infinite and free. We pile up, we add a banner, a third column, since it costs nothing. Except that the resource was never space; the resource is attention, and that one does not grow. What the client fears when they see white is not having had their money's worth. What they get by filling it is a page nobody reads.
We destroy legibility for fear of wasting, and the real waste begins exactly there.
So no, it is neither a designer's whim, nor a Scandinavian fashion, nor space to fill once we find something better. White is an object that used to be cast in lead, a ground negotiating with the figure, half a page held for five centuries and a silence Cage spent his life defending. Something that cannot be seen, and without which nothing else can be.
I will have to find a better answer, the next time someone leans over my screen to ask whether we can put something there. Because the real answer, the one I never manage to say fast enough, is that there is already something there. It is often the only part of the page I actually decided.
White is not what remains when you have finished. It is what you choose to give.
To dig further. The Gestalt work on the relationship between figure and ground, with Edgar Rubin's image of 1915. Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style. And John Cage, Silence.
