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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    [kde-artists] On the topic of White Space (Or why KDE3 appears to
From:       Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn () credativ ! de>
Date:       2007-01-06 12:44:06
Message-ID: 200701061344.06592.torsten.rahn () credativ ! de
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Hi,

In the recent thread "Oxygen accessibility and Tango compliance" some 
developers raised their concern about "wasting screen space".

This reminds me of an important topic that we need to handle soon for KDE4. 
KDE3 suffered from the fact that it looked too cluttered. One of the reasons 
for the cluttered appearance is the inappropriate usage of "White Space".

White space in visual arts does not refer to empty characters but to space 
intentionally left empty (like white areas in printed magazines or blank gray 
areas of a widget):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_space_(visual_arts)

"White space should not be considered merely 'blank' space - it is an 
important element of design which enables the objects in it to exist at all, 
the balance between positive (or none-white) and the use of negative spaces 
is key to aesthetic composition.
When space is at a premium, such as some types of magazine, newspaper, and 
yellow pages advertising, white space is limited in order to get as much 
vital information on to the page as possible. A page crammed full of text or 
graphics with very little white space runs the risk of appearing busy, 
cluttered, and is typically difficult to read. Some designs compensate for 
this problem through the careful use of leading and typeface."

Obviously in our case space is not considered purely a premium ( otherwise our 
user interface would look like http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com ). 
Instead we are aiming for an elegant appearance.

If you are curious about this topic you might want to follow the External Link 
Wikipedia gives:

http://www.logoorange.com/white-space.php

The Oxygen Team and the HCI group need to come up with some rules on the usage 
of white space. We need to quantify it and we need to make sure that a 
developer can "measure" whether the interface he created has an appropriate 
usage of white space which goes well with the Oxygen look and feel. So 
ideally we need an automatic solution there which validates the look.

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