Olivia DuBois – DTC 355
The website I looked at for the fashion category is Urban Outfitters (UO). https://www.urbanoutfitters.com. For the banking category, I looked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. https://www.jpmorganchase.com. And finally, for the non-profit organization, I looked at Palouse Habitat for Humanity. https://palousehabitat.org.
When I looked at Urban Outfitters, I immediately thought that they have great use of white space simply because there isn’t too much of it. In my opinion, I prefer for there to be a lot of content on a page rather than too much white space, and I think that UO does a good job at balancing that. As you scroll down on their homepage, you can see that some rows are full page width while some are about a normal fill. Having a mixture of both creates an even dynamic and doesn’t have any overwhelming aspects about it. The white space that is used is placed very neatly and you can tell that they really thought about where it was necessary such as the heading and subpage buttons.
When I looked at JPMorgan Chase & Co., I had some mixed feelings on my opinion towards it. There is more white space than I would prefer, but I also think it still looks really good. I think this is because even though there is a lot of negative space, there are also a lot of photos on the homepage that make up for it. There’s photos of all sizes and that are scaled in different ways that your focus shifts towards that instead of how much white space there is. I also think that there’s just enough elements on the page such as buttons, subpages, photos, etc. that the use of white space complements it.
Habitat for Humanity was the website I chose as the bad example of white space. It is is similar looking to the JPMorgan website, but there are a few things that separate them. First, everything about the homepage is underwhelming. There are not many pictures (beside the main one at the top), the graphics are not very good, and overall the design is just not captivating. I would recommend that they expand the width of their text/pictures/graphics to cut out some of that white space on the left and right hand sides. When everything is center aligned, it just looks a little boring. I would also advise that they get more pictures of people actually in action and of community bonding. There’s also al to of white background included with their images so I would suggest trying to get some more color in there as well. Even if there was more color in their graphics, the page would already look so different.