Seitz. Writes.

I’m going to propose a writer’s corollary to Murphy’s Law: The best ideas will always hit you when can’t write them down. Or, in my case, they’ll you about five minutes after you get into bed, when the sheets have finally reached the ideal temperature, forcing you to debate getting up for the next ten minutes, or until you fall asleep. Murphy’s a bitch.

Anyway, I’ve started working on designing a new template for this site. I’m not a web designer or programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I know just enough to get me by with a little help. I found this great tutorial that I used to figure out the basics, and now I’m bludgeoning my way through the rest of the process largely through trial and error. I actually like doing it that way, because I figure I’ll learn more from my own mistakes.

I’ve been tossing around a couple of ideas in my head for how I want the whole thing to look when I’m done, and, pursuant with Murphy’s Law, I had an epiphany (albeit one of those obvious ones that, in all likelihood, somebody else already had long before me) last night before I fell asleep.

All the graphic design work I’ve done (two whole semesters!) has focused more on print design than on web design, because journalism education is nowhere near catching up with the realities of the journalism industry. When you’re designing a print layout, you have almost complete control over how everything looks in the end. With the web, how it looks in the end is largely determined by the system that the reader is using. This irritates me to no end, because now I have to learn some coding.

One of those tediously fun aspects of design has always been white space. For those who don’t know, white space is essentially the summation of your margins, padding, leading, word spacing, and letter spacing. It’s basically everything that doesn’t contain design elements. Traditional printing has usually been black ink on white paper, hence, “white space.”

So my little epiphany is that you really don’t get white space with web design. You do get some control over it, but the wide range of resolutions used by everyone looking at the internet pretty much means that there will always be more or less negative space than you expect when the final product is viewed.

But level two of the epiphany is that white space on a computer screen isn’t actually white (right now, people who are more computer literate than I am are probably laughing to themselves, as if the little print Neanderthal had finally discovered fire). When you’re using ink or pigments, white is the absence of color and black is more or less the domination of color. But with pixels and light, white is the domination of color, while black is the absence of color (I know that this doesn’t completely apply to most monitors, since traditional LCD displays will always generate a little bit of light, even on black pixels, but let’s pretend that everybody has 10 grand to plunk down on an OLED monitor).

In the beginning, when computer were first going into use and there was just DOS, it was a black background with white (or colored) text. When everybody started using graphical operating systems, word processors and graphic design software, the goal was to imitate the final output. So it went to black text on a white background. The irony is that imitating the look of print required a full reversal of the principle of print. The text becomes the negative, while the white space becomes the positive.

In terms of publishing, that worked because people weren’t reading the final product on the computer screen. If you design a newspaper or magazine page on the computer, it was going to be printed anyway, so the final product would be black ink on white paper. It didn’t matter than the negative space concept was reversed while it was being created.

But now the writing, designing, and eventual publishing stays on the computer. I wrote this post on the computer, and you’re reading this post on the computer in a layout that’s designed for the computer (unless you want to print it out and read it that way just to prove me wrong). So if you’re reading this as black type on a white background, the white space is still reversed. The positive elements (the type) have become negative, and the negative elements (the background) have become positive. Black has become white, and dogs and cats may or may not be living together.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a reason why I hate black type on a white background online and, whenever I finish working on my new layout, you can probably expect light type on a dark background. Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Tags: coding, design, Meta
Filed under: Meta