We begin with the spectacular design works of Hofstede Design in Prahran Victoria, Australia. Established in 1996, this organization specialises in identity, publication and environmental graphic design. They use the term Graphic Design confidently and deliberately. Browsing their portfolio, you can see why.

In this example, Hofstede leverages space, shape, texture and color by virtue of typography alone. Although this looks terribly simple, it’s not. For this layout to succeed, careful consideration of the negative space was required.

In this example, understand that Hofstede could have put that photo and that typography anywhere on the page. Ask why they put it where they did. Is that eye pushing you toward the text? Does the negative space the eye travels make the text more important? This layout is masterfully designed.

Typography makes a face

Andy German of the UK blog “Paper Champion” designed the “Great Big Bushy Beard” as a t-shirt design for scoring at Threadless. He makes wonderfully playful use of the negative space and typography to make the point. Bravo, Andy.

Big, bold, killer space

Von is principal of Glitschka Studios, representing 23 years of simply stunning design work. His work reflects the symbiotic relationship between design and illustration. This Rhino logo is part of a “process” done by Von Glitschka.

The designer says:

This shows the before and after negative space of the ‘Rhino R’. Once again it’s important to find these areas you can improve upon as you go about your project. Don’t avoid them, be your worst critique and it’ll make for less changes on the client side. Don’t give your client the opportunity to art direct, do it yourself. I like to say “Clients may be the king but they aren’t the art director.”

Negative is Positive

From interlocked fish to children with a dove to a knife in the ‘a’ of blade and ‘H’ for hammer, there’s just no end to logos that utilize the left over space, to generate an image to reinforce the message.

Charlie B. Johnson writes in his Design Blog and shares his discoveries of 35 Logos brilliantly using Negative Space. Charlie writes:

Creating logo designs is not a big deal anymore, anyone can do it but what makes them different is your creative approach. Every designer wants his artwork to stand exclusively so people remember it in the long run. To achieve this goal always think out of the box and come up with brilliant creations. Specifically, while logo designing, try to be conceptual and utilize exclusive trends for your designs such as Negative Space … It takes a designer’s clever eye to balance the negative and positive space of a design.

Designing Negative Space

These are just a few examples. There are tens of thousands out there on the naked web. Many of the ‘trendy’ blogs now do nothing more than gather these resources and line them up for your pleasure and design inspiration. When creating your next publishing or graphic design layout, consider the empty space. What can it become? How can they subliminally deliver your message?

Good design utilizes the negative space as if it were a solid visual element in the design. Where this space occurs, its shape, and what it affects becomes of paramount importance in leading the reader or viewer to the intended result. Designing negative space is also designing the reverse space left behind by other elements, as in the vision of a white arrow hidden in the typography of the FedEx* logo. Some succeed, and some fail.

Probably the most well known use of negative space, aside from logos, is Bill Bernbach’s* famous “Think Small” ad. Bill knew that by leveraging the negative white space of the ad he would a) grab anyone’s attention by virtue of so much white space, and b) force every reader to enter the content well and READ the “Think Small” headline. Notice how the negative space seriously reinforces the whole message of the ad without actually having to read the ad. This ad has been credited with launching Volkswagen into the U.S. market with huge success — and awarded the top advertising campaign of the 20th century.

Visual Gulp

When the human is presented with a ‘visual gulp’ they do more than concentrate on form, image and texture. The mind begins analyzing and sifting through the visual elements deciding what they are, how they relate to each other, and where they fall in space. The notion of 2-dimensional space is almost never considered. As soon as the very first visual element is placed in a blank visual gulp, it affects that space and the eye alters it. The challenge for graphic designers is placing all visual elements into that space so it not only relates to other graphic elements — but relates to the empty space itself. The negative space.

What do we see?

In its investigation of elements in space, the human eye works to make sense out of the elements and their positions in relation with each other even before recognition and understanding take place. So, the elements suggest location, movement, importance and relationships without their individual meaning. The process seems to follow what scientists and Gestalt psychologists refer to as parsimony*, or ‘less is better’. Those who follow the Gestalt* Principles know the extensive research that established the way humans interpret visual stimulus. Vsions perceived by the eyes are grouped in two ways — the brain selects what it considers to be the most obvious foreground and background. Then with each of the elements of foreground and background, the brain has a tendency to further group them as follows: proximity, similarity, connectedness, continuity of patterns, and closure. The Gestaltists saw this as the mind organizing many into a single whole.

Foreground and Background

Without going into a full-scale dissertation on the Gestalt Philosophy, and design axioms — you can study those until you are quite literally ill, we can focus on two elements in all visual perceptions as foreground and background. More precisely defined as what’s in front, and what’s in back. That’s what negative space is all about — which element is closer to you, and which element is further away. Within this established realm of “space” the next focus is:

• what is it?
• how important is it?
• what does it relate to?
• what comes next?

This subliminal test takes place in milliseconds, unnoticed by the recipient, when the viewer’s eye is called upon to analyze any given ‘visual gulp’ or window of approach. Which is closer, the stop light, or the car in front of you? Which is more important? How do we know this?

Now, let’s apply this to the science of utilizing negative space in visual communications.

Many tweets I find in the twittersphere are tweets of tweets of tweets. A number of tweeters we’ve started following have evidenced a habit of tweeting the very same tweets repeatedly at intervals throughout several days. It’s sort of a sleazy way of getting your web blog mentioned and seen, but it appears to work.

I’ve also found tweeters tweeting as if the idea were theirs, when it was previously tweeted by umpteen tweeters in the tweet-jerks chain. This too is sort of slimy. There should be a rule that if you TWEET, then make sure you should tweet the ORIGINAL resource, rather than blogs that point to blogs that point to blogs.

One found today tweets about someone else’s blog, but pulls their blog up in a FRAME on the tweeter’s web site. That’s just downright dishonest.

The blogsphere is also suffering from the same cancer — growing at an alarming rate. I have watched one malignant blog for some time as it spereads across the internet. So far, the blogger has spread to ten blogs, all originating from the same IP block, domains owned by the same owner, etc. But each of the blogs are named totally different, have a totally different look and feel, and even claim to be authored by totally different people. Of course there are blinking ads everywhere, even in the middle of the context of the blog post. These are blogatutes. (Like prostitutes.)

The MO goes like this: the blogger gathers pictures from other people’s Flickr or Deviant Art sites, then puts them in a page promoting “10 wonderful somethings..” or “30 killer this or that…” This seems to excite other bloggers who then feverishly blog about it. (Since they don’t actually anything original to blog about on their own.) Then the jerks-blogger will use an automated program to post the SAME content to the other ten blogs plus their accounts for Delicious, Stumble, FaceBook, MySpace and umpteen others they’re propagating. Then they cross-comment it amongst other blogs and forums as if not associated with the blogs. So now you have a blog that points to a blog that points to a blog, and so forth, that all happen to be feeding the RSS channels as if they were unique works of journalism. Then thousands of innocent bloggers blog about the posting, resulting in what is termed “viral marketing”* — allowing the blog-jerks to make a living, doing nothing, with 10,000 times as many views and clicks as honest bloggers.

Some have even taken this to extremes by having a botnet or other automated IA crawl the web, posting links to any / every blog, forum or discussion group it can find. Now, that’s called SPAM, and it’s highly detested by forum and blog owners everywhere.

Enter Twitter:

Now these blogs become tweet-jerks by tweeting about their blogs. The twittersphere, in the relentless pursuit of ‘going viral’ tweets and retweets those tweets ad nauseam.

In the ‘old’ days, this same practice was called ‘cross posting.’ It was frowned upon by the honorable users of the internet. (And networks like Compuserve, Delphi and AOL long before the internet took off.) True journalists have disdain for quoting the wrong spokes person. Like a blog quotes “Joe smith said…” but when you track it down, Joe didn’t say it, he pointed to a NYT article where “Sam said…” but when you track that one down you find that Sam didn’t say it, he was quoting someone else. At some point you have no idea who said it, but Joe is taking the credit. Casual folk take it for gospel; not taking the effort to track it down before they quote it.

There’s really no law against it — it’s just sloppy and in poor taste. It’s what many have seen as the end of journalism*. Most of the twittersphere will say there’s nothing wrong with it because they’re too busy tweeting to get new followers. In reality it’s pretty underhanded — the jerks are exploiting the system for personal gain without doing much work or producing any worthy benefit for their readers.

Here’s my question: is this okay with you?

If you’re going to tweet, shouldn’t you tweet the originator of the tweeted subject — NOT another tweeter or blogger who tweeted or blogged about what they received or saw from another blog or tweet? Should the recipient of such tweets be forced to navigate back through a dozen layers of blogs to arrive at the originator of the subject of desire?

I’m just asking.