Marginally Great – Quick Design Tips: Margins

Keeping consistent margins in your layout, copy and basic design is one of the easiest things you can do to produce a cleaner site.

This comes as no surprise to someone who has been designing sites or using a grid based layout system for years but a lot of times someone new to the profession may overlook this basic design strategy.

Using consistent margins can help your site design in simple yet effective ways.

  1. It typically creates a design that is visually clean.
  2. Consistent margins add a layer of unification to your entire layout.
  3. The readability of copy is improved when the content is divided into well-spaced columns.
  4. Clean margins can help the visual flow of your website from top-left to bottom-right.
  5. Once defined, you can cause visual impact by breaking your own margin rules to highlight important ideas or imagery.

Cramped designs can benefit greatly by using margins to “air” the site out, adding negative space to the overall layout and relieving the visual tension cause by elements sitting to close to one another or having uneven borders.

By doing this you can created order from chaos and have a much better looking final product.