When you hear about white space in scrapbooking what do you think of?
- Layouts that are mostly a large clean area with a small cluster of items?
- The spaces around and in-between your items, regardless of how busy or clean the page is?
I hope you mostly think of the second one.
I don’t say that because there’s anything wrong with the first one — just that it’s a very limited view of white space, and white space is an essential part of every single layout, no matter what the layout is like.
Before I learned about design principles I had this growing sense that the spaces I was making between my 5-7 photos and my cropped papers made a huge difference in my pages, though I couldn’t yet say why. Then I started teaching myself to paint. One thing I learned is that paying attention to the spaces around the subjects in your paintings are at least as important as the subjects themselves.
From then on this phrase has always stuck with me: Mind your space!
You don’t need formulas for how much space to use at varying spots. Just pay attention to it and ask if the spaces you’re creating when you lay things down are pleasing and deliberate.
This simple act of redirecting your attention will make an enormous difference!
All these years I’ve been talking about design and how to use space, I’ve never talked much about “trapped white space.” I’ve rarely had to deal with it myself so it never occurred to me until recently to talk about it.
How is it possible I have very rarely run into trapped white space on my pages? Before I even knew what it was I figured out early how to place my items in certain ways that prevent you from trapping white space altogether.
So this week we made a video tutorial where I share…
- what trapped white space is, and how to recognize it on your pages
- an example where I’m fixing a page that has trapped white space
- how to think about your items and placement so that you avoid trapping white space in the first place
- my strategies of “justifying” and “nestling”
For a larger study on maximizing your white space, other episodes related episodes that Paperclipping Members can watch are:
- episode 165 – Communicate with Space
- episode 161 – Scale and Proportion in Scrapbooking
- episode 155 – The Dominance Principle and Groupings
- episode 114 – How to Use Space for Good Design
- episode 46 – Invisible Grids
You must have a membership to watch the videos. Click here to find out about a Paperclipping Membership.
Ready for some video tutorials? Click here!