Use white space effectively

- [Narrator] In the previous movie if you were following along, we fixed one common mistake first time designers often make and that is to scatter elements all over the page trying to fill in any and all gaps. It resulted in poor proximity, as related elements were not grouped, so it was hard for the learner to determine relationships and connections of information. In conjunction with grouping related items together in close proximity to one another, we should also consider using large areas of space to add organization and structure to the layout.

And regardless of the color of that space it's called white space, and that's what we need to add to our slide here in this file, our layout file we started in the previous movie. If you skipped to this movie and want to catch up open up Layout0302. We moved everything from the original slide here on slide one, to this new slide using one of the storyline to layout options at our disposal. So we no longer need this slide, slide one over here on the left hand side, with it selected press your delete key on the keyboard.

Now we're down to the only slide we need so far. And we do see that things are grouped together, but there's not enough space between, for example, the image across the bottom and some of the content. Even within the text columns that we see here, we might want to consider adding more space between objects, more space between the items that appear at the top of our slide. Let's start with the image at the bottom, 'cause it's really overlapping some of our content. So we'll select it, it's a group of objects that we placed together, so when we click we see handles around the outside of all four of these images.

Now we can go to one of the corners and click and drag it down and over. Hold down your shift key if you want to maintain the aspect ratio without distorting the images, and release your mouse first. You can see that looks a little bit better and we can move that into the center when we see those guides appear guiding us on the bottom and center, and release and click in the background. That's a little bit better, it's still a little bit too close though to our text above, so while this one looks good over here on the left, this one looks a little bit tight.

So some options are to move these around. Let's click first of all the text box containing all of the dates and click the border. Now hold down your shift key and click the title When and Where? Hold down your shift key and continue to click the title to the right and the content below it. Notice everything's selected now, and all you need to do is use your cursor keys on the keyboard the up arrow to bump it up. You can see it moves a little bit higher, maybe one more, click in the background to see what that looks like.

Getting better. It's much better organized now. There is a little bit of space in between the top, title, the logo, and space between the bottom of our text and the image that appears at the bottom of the slide. We might want to create a little bit more space in between the two columns as well. All we have to do there is click the left hand side here, go to the handle on the right middle, you can see the double arrow, click and drag that in. It's going to squish that content together and create an extra line, that's okay. Might even want to go a little bit further.

You know, I think we were good right where we were where you could see building A is together, I like that. And now when you click in the background, suddenly it's much more organized, it's much more pleasing to the eye and easier to understand. So as you can see the use of added white space suddenly makes the content on this slide a lot more pleasing to the eye, easier to look at and understand the message being conveyed. Now the only other thing we might consider with regard to the layout of this slide is what do we want our learner to focus on first? We'll explore focal points in the next movie.