In the Font series of blogs we talked about ways to chose and use fonts to make your site easier to read and understand. When it comes to space and layout it's no different. All of these components add up to the general feeling your site gives to the public, even well before you add graphics and colour.

Padding - it's not just for contact sports

Padding is the empty space that surrounds all content, images and design elements (such as boxes, buttons etc.) on your web site. Padding gives your eye a break between elements, without it your site would be a continuous string of content and images that would be almost impossible to understand.

The amount of padding needed for your eye to have an adequate break is a minimum of 10px or 1/8" (0.125").

A page that is so dense with content and has little to no padding makes the page look crowded and hard to read. We've all seen sites like these, you know one when you see it, it's tight, cramped, they're trying so hard to get you to notice everything that you end up disinterested and go to the nearest search engine looking for other sites.

A bad use of padding: everything runs together, empty spaces trap the eye.

Websites that have lots of padding around everything appear cleaner and simpler because there's more background exposed - allowing the elements on the page to stand out on their own rather than a big old mess. Think of padding on your website as the air you breathe - without it your site will suffocate.

A good use of padding: the page is divided up into invisible boxes. Your eye can now see each section of content at a glance.

So I bet your next questions is "How do I implement padding on my site?", don't worry we'll be posting a blog soon enough telling you how.