In the war of clarity against clutter, whitespace is your greatest ally. For some reason we tend to believe that empty space is a bad thing: we redundantly repeat things answering exams to fill up that dreaded white piece of paper, we fill out all our social media’s statuses, use up all the available characters allowed on an SMS… We have a compulsion to fill up all that empty space. You can easily see that people have the same problem when they create a presentation. Look at all those slideshows with rivers of bullet points, clipart, footers…  Having a slideshow without whitespace is, for your audience, like trying to give your whole presentation without stopping for a breath.

All this clutter confuses our brain and doesn’t allow us to focus on the message. If you want to communicate information you need to make your message clear so that people can follow. Going against this compulsion of filling up all empty space can be difficult. It is usually more difficult to be clear, succinct and concise than it is to blabber about. We have to learn to get rid of the unnecessary noise and keep only the core elements of our message. Then represent them on a slide. Don’t be afraid of empty space, it lets the eye rest and draws more attention to what it’s surrounding. Use slides with plenty of whitespace around the important elements, the eye will quickly grab focus of it and the brain will know it is important. The whitespace around an element or a word is like a frame for the mind which makes it stand out more and have bigger impact.

Try it in your next presentation and let me know how it goes.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

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