In the Fontseries of blogs we talked about ways to chose and use fonts tomake your site easier to read and understand. When it comes tospace and layout it’s no different. All of these componentsadd up to the general feeling your site gives to the public, evenwell before you add graphics and colour.

Padding – it’s not just for contact sports

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

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

A page that is so dense with content and has little to nopadding makes the page look crowded and hard to read. We’veall seen sites like these, you know one when you see it, it’stight, cramped, they’re trying so hard to get you to noticeeverything that you end up disinterested and go to the nearestsearch engine looking for other sites.

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

Websites that have lots of padding around everything appearcleaner and simpler because there's more background exposed –allowing the elements on the page to stand out on their own ratherthan a big old mess. Think of padding on your website as the airyou breathe – without it your site will suffocate.

A good use of padding: the page is divided up into invisibleboxes. Your eye can now see each section of content at aglance.

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