A layout rarely feels too crowded because one single element in the design is “wrong.” More often it happens because every element in the design is trying to grab attention at the same time. Your headline is big. Your body copy is cramped. Your image is too close to the edge. Your icon floats aimlessly. Your palette has too many accent colors. To a new graphic design student it’s hard to see what’s going on because the design has content it wants to share, yet the whole canvas is difficult to read.
One of the best things you can do to loosen up a crowded layout is to identify the main thing you want the user to see. On your poster or banner or social image, identify the visual hierarchy spot where your main idea should live. Perhaps it’s a headline, a product name, or an event title, or it may be a single standout callout. Once you’ve settled on what should be that focal point, you can arrange everything around it rather than trying to compete with it. You can make the headline look more prominent through size, contrast, placement, then have your subtitle and images and small elements take more quiet roles.
White space is often thought to be wasted space that needs to be filled. In a novice design concept, white space should feel like air around the main ideas. Having margins around the outside edges of the canvas can give the design a more purposeful, organized feel. Having padding around a text block will keep letters from bumping up against imagery and shapes. Having leading within a text paragraph will give the eye room to travel from one line to the next. Before adding another icon or color, take a moment to ask if your existing content can just use a bit more room.
Try designing with a super-constrained layout: a headline, a bit of text, an image and maybe an accent element, a small shape or button. Put them onto a design workspace and come up with three variations. In the first, keep everything close together. In the next, add margins and space out the text from the image. In the third, try a grid or alignment guides to get the elements’ edges to sit on a common plane. The advantage to this process is that you can compare the three drafts directly, making it easy to understand how your spacing works by comparing a few different layouts while using the same elements.
Typography can also cause your design to feel cramped, even when you aren’t using many pieces of content. Having multiple fonts, multiple font weights, and multiple text colors can be a source of visual noise. A better version might use a single font family with clear variations in size and weight for headline, subhead and body copy. For body copy that feels dense, increase the leading before you reduce the size. Copy can fit, yes, but not every bit of copy that fits is comfortable to read, whether the issue is that it’s too small, too tight or too low contrast to be readable.
Images need plenty of room as well. If you stretch an image to fill an odd gap in the canvas, you’ll wind up with a design that feels off-balance or uncontrolled. Cropping images with intent and leaving appropriate room between the image edge and the adjacent text will give you a more controlled layout. For a photo with a complex background, position your text in a less busy area, and use careful contrast to make your words legible. If an image is a part of the layout rather than something that just gets stuck in a corner, the design will look that much cleaner.
Finally, make sure you review your draft at thumbnail size. Zoom in to just how small your final design will be, to see whether the important content is still readable and to check if you’re using too much space. If your thumbnail just looks like a bunch of blurs, take something out, add a margin, use less color. A less crowded design doesn’t mean a simple one. It just means one that gives every element a job, gives that element enough room to perform its job and has a clear relationship with the other elements.