Digital White is many important things that are part of my everyday life as a ‘creative’ professional and student.
It is the white logo on my device after restart, it is the default background of my webmail service, it is probably the background of most UK state institutions’ websites, it is the background colour of Royal College of Art’s website, it is the default colour for most text input fields of online forms, it is the initial background of most creative software canvases, it is digital possibility and digital anxiety, it is clean, it is calm, it is neutral, it is empty, it is light, it is not dark, it is the opposite of black, it is used to transmit hierarchy, when used in conjunction with ‘space’ i.e. ‘white space’ it is a tool for creating visual harmony, it is the colour of very technologically advanced friendly dancing humanoid robots that we’ve never seen in real life.
‘Digital white’ is most of all the default colour I interact with the most, a defaultness I’ve never really noticed, let alone challenge. Having studied algorithms and programming at a very early age, I remained fascinated by the fact that computers spoke a ‘universal’ language with very little room for subjectivity. I always assumed that technology was the direct expression of objective, rational, scientific processes and experiments made by objective, rational and scientifically minded people.
According to Dyer (1997) the defaultness of white is such a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that it often times leads to its invisibility/overlooking as a design choice. But is this choice a purely rational one or does it carry with it a baggage of political cultural values attributed to whiteness throughout times? Is this choice a consequence of societal defaultness?
Bibliography
Dyer, R., 1997. White, London: Routledge.
SOEGAARD, M. (2019) The power of white space [online]. Available from: The Interaction Design Foundation < https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-power-of-white-space > [Accessed 25.10.2019].