Excessive Whitespace
SHOULD: Balance whitespace - excessive gaps break visual relationships and increase scrolling. Group related elements with proximity. Whitespace should be intentional.
Too much whitespace can fragment related content
Bad
Good
Why it matters
This is our own rule, not an upstream citation — the Rams review has no bullet for it, and we previously mislabelled it as one. It is the mirror of design-crowded-elements, and the reason both exist is that whitespace is not a quantity to maximise, it is a signal. The Gestalt law of proximity says the eye groups what is near and separates what is far, so a generous gap dropped between a label and its input, or between a heading and the paragraph it introduces, actively tells the reader they are unrelated.
Keep intra-group spacing smaller than inter-group spacing and the layout parses itself; invert that ratio and no amount of air will save it.
References