Whitespace is the empty space in a design: the gaps between paragraphs, the margins around a button, the room around a logo. It is sometimes called negative space, and it is just as much a design choice as the things you actually see. Empty space is not wasted space. The brands you trust the most usually use a lot of it.
Think of a museum. A single painting on a large bare wall draws your eye and feels valuable. Crowd ten paintings onto that same wall and each one fights the others for attention. Whitespace does the same job on a screen: it isolates what matters so a visitor knows where to look. Look at the Apple or Stripe homepage and you will see one headline, one product shot, and a sea of calm around it. It works hand in hand with good typography, since line spacing and the gaps between text blocks decide how comfortable a page is to read.
There are two kinds worth knowing. Macro whitespace is the big stuff, like the margins around a whole section. Micro whitespace is the small stuff, like the space inside a button or between list items, which overlaps closely with padding. Both shift as the screen changes, so spacing is planned alongside responsive design rather than added at the end. On a narrow phone you tighten the gaps a little, but you never strip them out, or the page turns into a wall of text nobody finishes.
At TopDevs we use whitespace deliberately in every layout we build, because the right amount of breathing room is often what makes a site feel professional and easy to use.
