When we were in school we learned to fill up our exams until we were out of space; it was frowned upon to hand in an essay that didn’t fill up the whole page. Most of us learned the trick: To write more, studying the same, you had to learn how to say the same thing in 3 different ways. And this is how we got used to filling up all available empty space. Don’t kid yourselves, the education system has been training us for this, a lot of exams when you’re young ask you to fill in a gap or complete the blanks. By the time we graduate we are experts at filling up empty space.

But, as it turns out, filling up empty space is not a good thing. In presentations, whitespace helps us reinforce our message and design better slides (read my post on whitespace here). Now that we don’t have to answer exams or write 10 page essays, we find ourselves filling up whitespace compulsively. In presentations you can see it in the use of clipart (tiny image that doesn’t contribute anything to your message, but that makes its way into 70% of presentations, merely because we have empty space). The most effective approach, however, is to learn to use whitespace to our benefit.

One of Yoda’s lessons is: “You must unlearn what you have learned”. Totally true! After 18 years learning to fill up empty space, we have to unlearn what we have learned and start to appreciate it. Instead of slides like this:

Learn how to get rid of what you don’t need, keep only what is needed to communicate your message and make something like this:

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Related posts:

1. Whitespace
2. Present information visually