Operation Northwoods

[Chris]

No reason. Other than I enjoy breaking the rules of editorial design in abstract style. You'll find much editorial design in the 'design world' does this. Fanzine magazine does it quite a a lot. And it's not whitespace, it's Negative Space, which is an important aspect of any design because it helps draw attention to the positive space.

FYI, negative space = whitespace, See alistapart . The way it's used here, I can't really see how it improves the focus of the content. All my attention gets shifted to the blank space. It's almost as if there's too much of it. The way whitespace (or negative space, w/e you want to call it) should work is it should act as an accelerator to important focal points. Our eyes tend to move in a particular direction around a layout or interface, and the negative space helps to control this somewhat chaotic movement. It can also be an extra element in a design, but I don't think that really applies here. The main application of whitespace is the ability to cushion text in a way that makes it easier to read. Given all those types of usage, I don't see how any of them can be applied here, at least not given the treatment. You could have aligned the first paragraph with the others, and have achieved almost the same effect. It actually makes the article harder to read, having to shift my line of sight upward rather than going downward, as it is read.

I guess what I'm saying is negative space can be a good thing, but it shouldn't be used 'just because', as I think may be the case here.

Edit: Here's a really good article on whitespace, for those interested. http://www.layersmagazine.com/negative-space.html - I think it holds a lot of prudence to what may or may not be misconceptions about whitespace / negative space.