Empty space on our pages is not leftover. It is the material we pace with.
A long page is a sequence of arrivals and rests, and the distance between them decides how the page feels to move through. Get that distance wrong and a page is exhausting even when every sentence in it is good. Most of what makes our long pages readable is not the writing. It is the spacing.
We learned this from comics — specifically from manhwa and webtoons, which are built for exactly the thing a long web page is: an unbroken vertical scroll on a screen you hold in one hand.
The gutter is where the reader works
In comics, the gutter is the gap between panels.
Gutter — The space between the panels. In this space, the reader moves from one panel to the next and comes to a conclusion about what is happening.
That last clause is the whole idea. The gutter is not a separator. It is where the reader does the work of connecting things — and therefore where the meaning actually gets made.
One of the most significant differences that the vertical layout creates concerns the role of the gutter spaces. As many comics scholars have argued, the gutter is the space where the reader’s most active participation takes place. It is in this space that the reader actively connects the adjacent panels to construct the narrative flow.
Despite their critical role, the gutters in conventional print comics are a visually dull, monotonous space, usually a narrow, white space between panels. But in webtoons, the gutter is used to create a diversified visual space to accompany the text. The gutter sometimes occupies more space than the panels and actively contributes to the narrative in various ways. In some cases, it is used to express the duration of time and/or changes of location by its length. A distinctively long gutter implies a long span of time or major change of scene. In other cases, the gutter uses a background color or design that defines the tone of the whole story. For instance, each episode of Sim Sŭnghyŏn’s Pape Popo uses one long, pastel-toned gutter which embraces all panels within it, and its light-peach or pale-pink color delivers the general impression of the story, which describes a young couple’s sincere and lovely romance.
Print gutters are uniform because paper is expensive and a page has edges. A scroll has neither constraint. The gutter can be as long as the idea needs.
Webtoon’s vertical layout not only changes the artistic features and functions surrounding the gutter space but also alters the way the reader/viewer experiences time and space. As Art Spiegelman has commented, comics is a medium that expresses time through space by organizing and arranging sequential moments on the page. Time is not an element that is obviously visible in comics, so the organization of space creates temporality of various tempos and segmentations through a number of techniques.
A page expresses time through space. That is the sentence to keep. The reader’s experience of how long an idea takes is set by how much room it is given, not by how many words it contains.
Wavelike visual flow
The vertical scroll is not a stack. It is a path.
Some visual traits of this style, apart from the use of full-color artwork, involve wide gutters and a storytelling pattern intended to “carefully create a wavelike visual flow.” The idea is that the story naturally draws the eye downwards, mimicking how ancient picture scrolls would have been read in some senses. There is no page to turn, just a path to follow, and that can be very appealing and easy to read for a generation raised online.
Although it might seem like images are simply lined up one after another in webtoons, the drawings, panels and speech bubbles are all carefully composed to create a wavelike visual flow that guides the gaze of the reader.
— Dalma Kálovics, Manga Across Media
“Carefully composed” is doing real work in that sentence. A page that alternates — text, quote, image, space, text — reads as a flow. A page that runs eleven paragraphs and then four images reads as two chores.
Our practical version: something breaks up the text on every screen. A pull quote, a lily pad, an image, a spacer, a heading. If you can scroll a full screen height and see nothing but paragraphs, the page needs work.
Pause points
Space is where a reader breathes.
But gutter in general is essential for webtoon. A huge thing in its favor is that it serves to add dramatic pauses to the narrative or make the action move quickly and fast.
Full color comics tend to be hard on the eyes, blank spaces or panels are made to breath and keep a clean reading experience.
They put white space where they want the reader to feel a pause or to distinguish events.
Fight scenes in webtoons often have a lot of white space because they want you to see the actions happen in “beats”.
They might be put in after speeches to give it a feeling of trailing off.
They might have an entire page of white space as a sort of paragraph break to jump forwards in time.
I think it’s for setting the reading pace or the mood (like building up suspense) as you scroll down.
it can be used to set the tone/pace as in quicker action less space in between
it can be used to change scene more easily like day to night
it also allows imo for the reader to take a breather between scene
We call these fermata — the musical mark meaning hold this longer than written. A spacer before a heading is a fermata. It says: that section is over, put it down, the next one starts when you are ready.
The rules we actually use
Spacing arguments are easy to agree with and hard to apply, so these are the numbers.
- Something breaks up the text on every screen. A pull quote, image, list, colour block, or spacer.
- A heading roughly every five screens on a laptop, or less.
- Twenty headings maximum on a page. Past that, it is two pages.
- A “coming up” table of contents after ten headings, so a reader who has been going a while can see what is left and decide.
- A spacer before a heading, to make the break land.
- Spacers as pause points, deliberately placed — not as filler where the layout looked cramped.
- Consider a Bodymind Break after ten headings. Permission to stop, written into the page.
- Group related things on a colour background with a title, so a reader can recognise the group and skip past it as a unit. Ours are lily pads.
None of it is mandatory. A short post needs almost none of it. A long field guide page needs most of it.
Pacing belongs to the reader
There is a version of this that goes wrong, and it is worth naming because our sources are full of it.
Webtoon spacing is often used to control the reader — to build suspense, to withhold, to make a reveal land at the moment the author chose. That works in fiction. It is the wrong goal here.
We are not pacing a story you are following. We are pacing a reference you are foraging in, on a day we know nothing about. So our spacing is built to let you set the pace rather than to set it for you — the same principle as Designing for Motion, where the reader holds the throttle. Whitespace that invites a pause defers to the reader. An animation that forces one does not.
This is also why our structure runs the opposite way to a webtoon’s. A webtoon withholds; we front-load the key points and let the detail arrive later. The layout technique transfers. The suspense does not.
Stopping halfway is a valid way to read. Every rule above exists so that a page still works for someone who read four screens of it and left.
Where this connects
Lily Pads are the grouping half of the same practice — the panels to this page’s gutters.
Designing for Memory is why the rhythm matters beyond comfort: a page you can re-enter is a page you can remember, and distinct, well-spaced sections are what make re-entry possible.
Scrollytelling is the storytelling form these techniques serve, and Page Conventions is the full build manual for everything else on a page.
Space is not what is left over when the content is placed. It is the thing that makes the content readable.