Using Negative Space to Your Advantage in Visual Presentations
By Kimberly Grant
Silence is golden.
While it may be the catchphrase used by AMC Theatres to ask audience members to silence their phones, devices, and their mouths during a movie, it’s also a great description for a marketing secret.
Silence is also quite powerful. It can be conveyed in colors other than gold, like white or black or cerulean. Silence can sometimes speak volumes in ways that mere words cannot. Silence could also be defined as an absence. The absence of sound. The absence of words. Even the absence of shapes. The visual aspect of silence in the arts and marketing world is called “white space”.
Alex W. White, author of The Elements of Graphic Design (2nd edition), describes white space as a “raw ingredient” and has various nicknames like “negative space”, “trapped space”, “counter form”, “working white”, and (my favorite) leftover space. This has nothing to do with eating half of your meal and leaving space for leftover dessert. Although, I used to think my leftover space was just because I could only draw stick figures.
Alas, I am wrong. White space or negative space has many functions; which is why White (the author not the color) begs his readers to “please don’t think of it as emptiness waiting to be filled in.” There are various ways of conveying emptiness that marketers employ to draw their audience’s attention. However, there is a fine line between negative space and just plain “lacking in creativity space”. I made up that last quote.
Mostly used as foreground or background of an image, white space draws the audience member’s eyes to a specific image within a frame; when it is done properly. White space can also communicate things like quality (class, wealth), solitude (abandonment, loneliness), purity (unadulterated), Heaven (absolution), Openness (distance, infinity), and calmness (undisturbed, inaction).
For example, the image below draws the eyes toward the center image because of its solitary existence within the white space of this post. The negative space allows your eyes to focus on the most important part of this image: the yellow tear drop. If this yellow tear drop was a campaign for my company brand, it’s solitary existence would serve as a reminder to my current and potential customers that my company is still relevant and operational.
The various ways to use negative space are endless and industries use white space to their advantage as a standard practice. Boutiques and high-end department stores, like Nordstrom’s, use emptiness to convey a level of sophistication. The communication message being that their clothing and accessories are so exclusive, they don’t have enough product to fill the sales floor. It’s ingenious if you ask me. I like clean lines and open spaces, because cluttered spaces stunt my creativity and make me feel anxious. If I feel this way, others must feel the same.
This leads marketers to consider ways to attract people like me to see their ads and build awareness. Some of the best ads I’ve seen were mostly devoid of a lot of excess imagery. The negative space was used just right. One company that has consistently used negative space to its advantage in ad campaigns is Pepsi; which I don’t drink. In a magazine print ad, Pepsi debuted one of its most iconic ad campaigns, featuring Sophia Vergara. The ad was simple, yet effective, using negative space to its advantage, i.e., turning a negative into a positive.
Vergara is wearing a royal blue top and matching beach hat sipping on a slender can of Pepsi while looking directly at the reader. The background or negative space of the image is a lighter blue than the dress and hat. There is a vertical phrase that runs along the right side of the image that reads: “the new skinny can”. This type of monochrome look and typesetting is a perfect use of negative space.
The viewer, once the cherry red of Vergara’s lips and a portion of the “new skinny can” catches their eyes, focuses on the two main parts of the image: Vergara and the newly released skinny can. Had the marketers not used the negative space in the background, the communication message would have been lost by a noisy background.
As someone who enjoys clean lines and empty spaces to enhance creativity, I think negative space (and the blissful silence it creates) is a great tool that marketers have in their arsenal of creativity. If less is more – like that skinny Pepsi can – then the silence of negative space is golden; like watching a great movie in a quiet theater.
To view more of Pepsi’s ads and their use of negative space, you can visit their website.
