Benad's Web Site

Something I was careful about a few years ago when I designed my web site was about not wasting too much visual space, especially since the site might be viewed by mobile browsers. Still, for the past few years, the “cool design thing” to do is to place your content at the middle of a huge canvas of white space. So I wasn’t too much surprised when a co-worker’s first impression of Windows 8’s Metro design was the obvious waste of screen space with the massive amount of padding on all sides.

This seems to be the complete opposite of what used to be those ornate frames you had around paintings up to the twentieth century. With modern art you have to place your tiny painting with no frame on a huge white wall, to capture attention. I’ve seen the same effect in photography books: placing a picture at every other page only, purposely placing a small picture in the corner of the left page with the whole right page empty white, and so on.

Enough is enough. Placing a few words in a huge but unusual typeface on a web page that scales well only on my 17-inch MacBook Pro is not design. Padding a small column of text with 400 pixels of padding on each side is not cool. And if you do, whatever little content still remains on screen better be damn good, otherwise you’re just mimicking modern museums to give some unwarranted grandeur to your pretentious “design”.

Says the guy that can’t draw even if his life depended on it.