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027 How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White Space

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Previous Episode:026 The Best Articles Always Have This (and a Great Headline) More Episodes Next Episode:028 How to Be Smart in a World of Dumb Verbs

All Episodes:

October 21, 2015

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097 The Problem with the ‘Hell-For-Leather’ Writing Movement

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096 Why These Famous Time-Management Techniques Are Ruining Your Productivity

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095 Freaking Out Over the Thought of Writing a First Draft? Try Scaffolding

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094 How to Avoid Obscurity by Misusing Language

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093 A Creative Email Trick for Becoming a Plain Spoken Writer

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092 Let This Stupid Machine Read Your Copy Out Loud

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091 This Free App Will Help You Write Bold and Clear Copy

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090 Four Writing Lessons I Learned from This Depressing Music Project

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089 The Clear-Copy Rule of Writing for the Web

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088 Three Ways Writers Must Adjust in a World Dominated by Social Media

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087 How This Social Media Thing Kicked Web Writing Right in the Feels

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086 An Elegant Story on Outsmarting Career Obsolescence

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085 Raise the Stakes! 13 Writing Ideas That Really Work

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084 The Two Things That Make a Dull Product Irresistible

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083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

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082 Could Podcasting Make You a Better Writer?

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081 When Do You Abandon the Editing Process?

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080 Four Ways to Get Attention by Rocking the Boat

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079 A Brief Introduction to the Art of Catching Hell

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078 Six Storytelling Lessons from a Famous Urban Legend

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077 Vexed by Your Bankrupt Vocabulary? Listen to This

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076 Why Writers Need to Develop a Sense of Humor

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075 Listener Challenge: Could You Read 100 Books in a Year?

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074 How to Get Massive Attention with a ‘High-Concept Pitch’

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073 A Lesson in Swagger from a Wooden-Legged Civil War Soldier

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072 Six Ways to Becoming a Completely Original Writer

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071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

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070 Eight Things Every Writer Should Know about Landing Pages

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069 The Fascinating Truth about Boring Topics

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068 How to Craft an About Page That People Actually Read and Share

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067 The Psychology Behind Winning Email Subject Lines

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066 All Great Writing Boils Down to These Four Emotional Appeals

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065 A Mildly Spooky Illustration of “Reason Why” Copy

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064 A Mild Warning for All Headline Writers

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063 How Every Creative Must Think about Marketing and Advertising

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062 Do Millennials (Really) Hate Long Copy?

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061 These 4 Sales Principles Can Improve Anyone’s Writing

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060 How to Use the 5 Stages of Audience Awareness to Dominate Online

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059 Why The Most Hated Headline Structures Work So Well

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058 This is the Most Fun You’ll Ever Have “Explaining the Mechanism” …

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057 The Doomsday Cult School of Specificity

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056 How to Sweep Away Skepticism with a Dramatic Demonstration

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055 Meet the Tragic Poster Boy for the Emotional Brain

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054 A Straightforward Research Method for Finding a Potent Hook

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053 What You Don’t Know about Your Product Can Kill Your Copy

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052 Three New Ways to Write a Headline (and When to Use Each)

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051 Want Copy That Actually Works? Start with Mass Desire

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050 The Curious Secret to Building Trust and Credibility

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049 My Second Most Favorite Copywriting Formula in the World!

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048 How to Get Lazy People to Care about Your Ideas

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047 My Favorite Copywriting Formula … Ever!

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046 How to (Rapidly) Build an Audience with Content Syndication

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045 Solve Your Online Proofreading Problems With This Simple Trick

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044 The Profanity Princess on Finding Your Voice

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043 The Oddest Story About Overcoming Obscurity You’ll Ever Hear

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042 10 Odd Books That Will Improve Your Writing

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041 How to Read a Book in 2 Hours

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040 The Shocking Way to Master Any Book

May 18, 2015

039 Nine Copywriting Books for Web Writers

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038 The 8 Rules of Ruthless Editing from David Mamet

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037 Revealed: The Perfect Blog Post Length

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036 The Aggressive Work Ethic of Highly Creative People

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035 The 10 Rules of Rough Drafts

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034 5 Ways to Create the Perfect Ending that Your Content Deserves

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033 6 Simple Rules For Writing Effective Dialogue

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032 Use Internal Cliffhangers So People Never Stop Reading

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031 226 Transitional Words and Phrases Every Writer Should Know

April 30, 2015

030 The Great Paragraph Hoax

April 29, 2015

029 5 Ways to Write a Seductive Sentence

April 28, 2015

028 How to Be Smart in a World of Dumb Verbs

April 27, 2015

027 How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White Space

April 23, 2015

026 The Best Articles Always Have This (and a Great Headline)

April 22, 2015

025 The Anatomy of a Hyperlink That Woos Readers

April 21, 2015

024 The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Bullet Points That Work

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023 How to Create Exquisite Subheadlines

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022 Four Safe Ways to Find Your Writing Voice (and One Dangerous One)

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021 The Two Kinds of Knowledge Every Writer Needs

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020 The Crazy Thing Writers Do to Become Exceptional

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019 How to Answer the Most Important Question About Becoming an Exceptional Writer

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018 Four Things That Can Make Writers Famous

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017 A Small Gift for Your Dark Days as an Obscure Writer

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016 Steal This Episode

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015 David Sedaris’ Guide to Writing Brilliant First Sentences

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014 Six Proven Ways to Open an Article With a Bang

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013 How I’ll Make You Read Every Single Line of This Article

March 31, 2015

012 The Ugly Truth About How People Read Online

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011 The 3 Pillars of Great Web Writing

March 26, 2015

010 How to Use RSS to Write Better Headlines

March 25, 2015

009 How to Write Headlines that Get Results

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008 Where Headlines Have Gone Horribly Wrong

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007 A 12-Minute Crash Course on Link Building (Ugh)

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006 An Idiot-Proof Guide to Writing Blog Posts That Google Loves

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005 Keywords: Your Love Affair With the Language Your Audience Uses

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004 How Search Engines Work, Part Two

March 16, 2015

003 How Search Engines Work, Part One

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002 The Unbreakable Law of the Web

March 2, 2015

001 Two Challenges All Digital Content Must Conquer

April 27, 2015

027 How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White Space

White space sounds like a design issue. So why should you, dear web writer, care? Because words matter.

I want you to imagine a statue. An aged bronze sculpture of a young girl, possibly eight years old, in a long dress.

She stands about 50 inches … roughly four feet tall.

Her head is cocked to the left, a pensive, sad look on her face. Both elbows are pinned to her side and her forearms stretch upward, her palms open to the sky, a bowl in each hand.

As if she is feeding the birds. You probably recognize this statue.

Discover the name of this statue and what it can teach you about white space, web writing, and more in this episode. Plus:

  • Don’t make this mistake when thinking about white space
  • How web writers can improve their copy with white space
  • The problem print magazines like Woman’s Day always fall for
  • The two books on web usability every web writer should read
  • A beautiful little essay by designer Mig Reyes about copywriters

Listen to Rough Draft below ...

027 How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White SpaceDemian Farnworth
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The Show Notes

  • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
  • White Space
  • Robert Bruce
  • Beyond by Daft Punk
  • Design Is Still about Words
  • Letting Go of the Words
  • Prioritizing Web Usability
  • No Sidebar
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The Transcript

How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White Space

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Demian Farnworth: Howdy dear podcast listener, this is Rough Draft, your daily dose of essential web writing advice. I am Demian Farnworth, your host, your muse, your digital recluse, and the Chief Content Writer for Copyblogger Media.

And thank you for sharing the next few minutes of your life with me.

I want you to imagine a statue. An aged bronze sculpture of a young girl, possibly eight years old, in a long dress. She stands about 50 inches, so roughly four feet tall.

Her head is cocked to the left, a pensive, sad look on her face. Both elbows are pinned to her side and her forearms stretch upward, her palms open to the sky, a bowl in each hand.

As if she is feeding the birds.

You probably recognize this statue. It was created in 1936 by Sylvia Shaw Judson. It sat in a cemetery, unnoticed, however, until 1994 when it appeared on the cover of the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

On the book cover, in the foreground, the sculpture stands alone. In the background, scattered sparingly, are tombstones. Trees draped with Spanish moss flank the sides.

It’s a spare photograph, making it an exquisite example of negative space used to accentuate the focus of the photograph: which is the sculpture. The content.

Now imagine you open a door and there stands Bird Girl in a closet full of dusters and furs and floggers and abandoned lamp shades. Now it is you cocking your head, trying to make out what she is and why she is in a closet in the first place.

That image — that image of Bird Girl in the closet — if you saw that on the cover of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” it would have flopped.

At the least it would have communicated a very different set of expectations about the content of that book.

But the photographer behind the book understood what he was doing. He understood the impact of negative space on his subject.

Don’t Make This Mistake When Thinking About White Space

In the print and web world, the term “negative space” is normally labeled “white space.” And it would be a mistake to call it “blank space.”

White space serves a purpose. It aids readability. It gives a page a classic, rich, elegant appearance. There is nothing blank about it.

How Web Writers Can Improve Their Copy With White Space

Designer Keith Robertson says “White space is nothing. White space is the absence of content. White space does not hold content in the way that a photograph or text holds meaning and yet it gives meaning, through context, to both image and text. In fact, white space can make or break the effective transmission of image and text.”

Nor does white space overwhelm, but rather invites the reader into the text.

The Problem Print Magazines Like Woman’s Day Always Fall For

Right now I’m flipping through a copy of “Woman’s Day” — don’t ask — and every page is crammed with text and images and color. Space is at a premium, so there is no sparing the white.

But that’s not the case online.

For example, look at a site like Robert Bruce’s, “Unusually Short Stories,” a site designed by our very own Brian Gardner, and you’ll see the design is devoted to the words. There is much white space.

Words hold court. And one is reminded of the line in the song “Beyond” by Daft Punk:

“The perfect song is framed by silence.”

A Beautiful Little Essay By Designer Mig Reyes About Copywriters

Which reminds me of a beautiful little essay by Mig Reyes on the 37 Signals blog written in early 2013.

Reyes, who is a designer and is speaking to other designers, writes:

Click away from the pen tool…
Put down your Pantone book…
Stop rearranging your layers…
Close your stock texture folder…
Log out of your Dribbble…
And hug your copywriter…
Designing for the web is still about words.

Reyes punctuates each line with a comparison … one photograph with words, the same photograph without.

And the photographs without the words are meaningless.

Listen, we still need words. I don’t care what they say.

See, even up to now, really everything I’ve been teaching you — about bullets, and subheadlines, and links, and everything I will be teaching you — has and will be a lesson in white space.

A lesson in context. A lesson in control.

This is one of the reasons that I prefer writing all my drafts inside WordPress on my own blog — whether that article will be published on The Copybot, Copyblogger, or elsewhere: I like to preview my article as I write to make sure I have enough white space.

White space between words, white space between paragraphs. White space between sentences.

And when I see a block of text, I break it apart into shorter paragraphs, sentences, words, or bullet points.

Sculpting as I go.

You dear web writer, shape the meaning of your content with the words, but shape the presentation by formating. By the white space.

The Two Books on Web Usability Every Web Writer Should Read

If you want to learn more about this topic, which falls under the discipline of web usability, here are two books I highly recommend:

Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish and Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger.

Better yet, subscribe to Brian Gardner’s podcast, No Sidebar. You’ll learn how to eliminate the unnecessary, increase conversion, design a better business, and build a more beautiful web.

Which is your responsibility, dear web writer.

Until next time, take care.

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Comments

  1. John Patrick Weiss says

    May 6, 2015 at 9:35 AM

    Exactly. More and more I find websites, and other designs that are littered with superfluous distractions, annoying. They detract from the main content. Both my art site at http://www.JohnPWeiss.com and writing site at http://www.JohnPatrickWeiss.com are quite minimalistic. I just find it more appealing. Even did away with the pop ups, as effective as they might be. They’re still annoying.

    Reply
  2. Demian Farnworth says

    May 6, 2015 at 12:02 PM

    Your sites are looking great, John!

    Reply

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