Why is this the case? It’s not that the developers deliberately modified the design. It’s not that they necessarily consider alignment and whitespace to be unimportant. It’s just that these elements in the user interface are often invisible to them.

For a designer, … whitespace is often just as important as the content.

Development teams are responsible for putting interactive features and content into a product. Empty space is neither feature nor content. Therefore, it is not a requirement. For a designer, however, whitespace is often just as important as the content.

As a designer, I spend a lot of time adjusting whitespace to enable effective scanning of content. I also spend a lot of time refining alignment and padding to establish the right prioritization between user interface elements. I utilize both of these design elements to guide users through the interactions on a page. I use them to communicate what’s most important, what’s related, and what needs attention. For designers, these are key requirements of effective communication. And yes, there’s a lot of evidence that shows what’s invisible does make a difference.

A shared understanding of what’s being built—whether visible or invisible—goes a long way toward making products that our users can understand.

Now before you decide I am a whiny designer just getting on the case of user interface engineers for not building exactly what I designed, let me say that I know what the engineering team does in bridging the gap between a product design and an actual product is invaluable.

But just like designers should know what is possible with HTML and CSS—or whatever happens to be their medium—and how to make their designs bulletproof, development teams should recognize that the space between and around user interface elements and the alignment of those elements may be just as important as the elements themselves.

I’d love to see more developers bring the skills and craft they apply to the construction of the visible to the construction of the invisible: padding and alignment. Once they learn to look for these things in a design specification or mockup, they’ll have a better sense of the designer’s intent. A shared understanding of what’s being built—whether visible or invisible—goes a long way toward making products that our users can understand.