All too often I find myself in a room discussing a design layout for a web application or web site when someone suggests moving elements around to “save space”. Unfortunately, because they are focused on screen real estate alone, they forsake usability for geometric efficiency. They attempt to fit elements geometrically, like a game of Tetris, with total disregard for the logical order and relationships of the objects. All that seems to matter is that things are packed as tightly as possible, tossing whitespace, visual hierarchy, and logical arrangement out the window!

It is much better to have a logical, learnable, easy to use layout that takes up more vertical space than to have a tightly packed layout that forces the eye to forage for what it needs each time the product is used. If you’re lucky you can achieve both, but don’t forsake the former for the latter.

Do you want your thumbnails to appear in a nice, neat grid or a messy collage? Or how about in list form? Well, many sites are offering different page layout options, so you can choose whichever format you want. I’m all for customization when it comes to page layout. Here are a few sites that I think handle this well (Although, I think the iconographic implementation chosen by Dropular and Image Spark works best.):