David Kadavy, author of Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty, will discuss the art of using white space for clean design in his panel at SXSWi entitled, White Space: Shaping Nothing for Clean Design.

The term clean design is often thrown around in the web design field, but no one seems to focus on the tactics used to obtain this goal. David points out, “I think people tend to think that for a design to be ‘clean,’ it simply has to have less stuff on it. But you don’t always have the luxury of removing things from a design. Clean design really involves understanding the essence of what you’re trying to convey, and then conveying it with graphic efficiency. You have to know how to say things about the information by using alignment, size, texture, and subtle control of the spaces between elements.”

Kadavy’s book, which debuted at #18 on the bestseller list for Amazon, addresses all key elements of clean web design including, color theory, typography, proportions, and design principles. He notes on the back cover of the book, “If you want to learn to create great design yourself…there simply is no way to do so with lists of rules. Instead, I want to provide you with a new set of eyes through which you can see the world anew.” Kadavy discusses everything from Monet using white space to why Comic Sans is such a big joke in the world of typography.

In his panel on Sunday, March 11th, Kadavy will discuss what we can learn about the use of negative space from sculpture, architecture, and art of the past and how those methods can be applied to grid layouts, typography decisions, and graphic design of today.

Clean web design has almost become the standard and most successful web applications i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google “exhibit an impressive lucidity in visual communication,” as Kadavy so eloquently describes it. Overall Kadavy believes that now that we’ve worked out the bugs with getting sites to work, it is now time to start focusing on producing beautifully and well thought out designs. “We’re up to the next rung on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – and that’s design that truly conveys the intentions of our creations, the limits of our technologies, and the richness of the state of humanity. We’re achieving self-actualization.”

Be sure to check out this clip of Kadavy’s presentation of Why you hate Comic Sans…