Negative Spacing!!!!!!

Giving a bit of a background. I am a newbie in the field of graphic designing. I recently got to host an event on graphic designing and this was the first topic or the principle of graphic designing which i learnt about. So here comes my interpretation on negative spacing.

According to general human mindset or mentality, if something is silent, colourless or empty then it is considered to be bad. We often take these for granted. What we should realize is that only silence lets us know the value of sound, if something’s colourless then it lets us feel the colours more brighter and deeper when they appear on screen and only the absence of air lets us realize its true value. Today we will be talking about one of the most important aspects of graphic designing which is called negative spacing.

So let us consider a situation. Imagine that we come to a room full of pile of clothes or pile of books, full of shelves and the room is very messy. Imagine if we have to search something in this room. How would your reaction be? The person who has to search something from such a room will feel frustrated and at some point of time the person will lose his concentration. This is the same case which happens when the users open a design overloaded with content. Sometimes the clients or the designers may feel that if they put a lot of features or elements in their design then it will help them and the viewers will be able to grab the message of the design and they also feel that the users will be able to know the purpose behind the design but the case is actually the opposite.

Whenever viewers open such a design then they lose their concentration trying to figure out the message in the design and the work of designer is left unrecognized because the message is not clear to the viewers.

Leaving negative space is also essential in viewers perspective as well because it lets the viewers breathe in the design and it helps the viewers to use their imagination and their creativity in the design even though they are not the designers. It lets the audience explore their own creativity and it lets them to see the design in their perspective.

So here are some of the illustrations showing the use of negative space.

This is one of the best examples of negative spacing used in an illustration. So this illustration tries to depict the story of Snow White and the seven dwarfs. So there is one instance in the story of Snow White and the seven dwarfs where the Witch offers Snow White an apple and when Snow White eats it then she becomes unconscious. So if a designer tries to depict this instance without the use of negative spacing then the designer has to use three different objects for depicting Snow White,Apple and the Witch but in this illustration that the designer smartly used negative spacing on a single object and depicted an entire instance of the story.This also shows that negative space reduces work for the designer as well.The single object used is apple and by leaving empty spaces creatively on that apple the Witch and Snow White is portrayed. So we can see that we can create something very creative and even a new illustration or a design can be created by leaving empty spaces on a single object. That is the power of negative spacing and this shows how it is vital for graphic designing.

This design creatively tries to portray about a girls dancing team. So the designer creatively leaves an empty space on the object bird in the shape of women which tries to show the free spirit of women. So due to negative spacing the designer can promote the free spirit of women as well promote the dance team. Creative way to make the feminists happy i guess!!!

This illustration is one of the most creative examples of negative spacing. This illustration tries to portray a murder scene. The background is red but the empty space is created in shape of knife. You guys can also notice a face made on the handle of a knife. So this illustration shows that just by creating an empty space on a red background creatively can lead to a new illustration or a new design. The effort that has to be taken by a designer is to think creatively and just by creating an empty space the designer can create new stuff. The only boundation is the creative boundary of the designer.

This example shows how easily a new design can be created just by creating a simple empty space. In the case of this design if the designer simply wrote the letter ’N’ in the same font as all the other letters then this would have just felt like a plain text and there would have been nothing creative about this. Just by creating an empty space and by not writing the letter ’N’ this just went from a plain text to a new design or a illustration. This shows that how negative space is one of the most vital principle or the fundamental of design.

At last i would like to conclude by saying that negative space is one of the most important concepts for the designers to have knowledge about because if everything yells for your viewers attention then nothing is heard so the concept of negative space cannot be taken for granted.