Gemini on Bad Gutters and Ugly Whitespace

question:

What are some good layperson’s visual web design principles? sometimes I see sites with huge white gutters and think it looks terrible with no color to break it up, like half the screen on either side of content is empty.

Answer:

You’re not wrong to react to that. “Huge white gutters” are often defended as minimalist or content-first, but when they’re poorly handled they feel wasteful, cold, or even unfinished. Good visual web design isn’t about rules like “lots of whitespace is good” — it’s about intentional balance.

Here are solid, practical visual design principles, with special attention to the wide-screen gutter problem you’re describing.

1. Whitespace is a tool, not a virtue

Good whitespace:

Improves scannability

Creates hierarchy

Separates unrelated content

Bad whitespace:

Dominates the viewport

Contributes nothing visually

Makes content feel small or timid

The common mistake

Designers center a narrow column (e.g., 640–800px) on a 1440–2560px screen and leave the rest blank.

Result:

The site feels empty, corporate, or “default Tailwind demo”.

Better approaches

Adaptive max-widths (grow the content container on large screens)

Decorated gutters (subtle color, texture, or pattern)

Asymmetric layouts (sidebar, rail, or visual anchor in the gutter)

2. Content should scale

with

screen size (within reason)

A hard max-width: 700px makes sense for reading long text — but not for everything.

A useful heuristic

Content type

Max width guidance

Long-form text

60–75ch

Marketing pages

1100–1400px

Dashboards / tools

90–95vw

Image-heavy layouts

Edge-to-edge

If everything is constrained to the same narrow column, the design feels inflexible and dated.

&nb