What is white? For a color that is considered to be void of hue, white is wrought with meaning, negative and positive. This color, or lack thereof depending on whether your world is additive or subtractive, is the champion of all, used ubiquitously in most printed matter as well as online. So what makes mastery of this anti-color so precious?

I have never really thought of designing with white, mainly because this color was representative of substrate in a majority of print projects. In the Web world, it defined the container to fill with vivid and subtle colors to enhance the user's experience. So it was always in my palette because it HAD to be. No other color could be had without it.

A while ago, my wife and her colleagues batted around the idea of making a web site of pure white, with the objects and text only creeping out of the 255,255,255 range a few miniscule steps to let the user know the page was there. We all laughed and raved how cool that would be, in a John Cage way. Much like Ween creates a music joke that only they get, a white site would be something that web designers would laugh about and show off at parties, but the practicality of such a thing is non-existent.

Or so I thought at first.