With so many bold visual elements in website design projects—and so many responsive breakpoints to deal with—white boxes are re-emerging as a container element for text. White boxes with dark text inside can ensure readability when it comes to messaging on top of photos, video or illustration where there is color variance.
And while this trend might sound a little, well…sloppy or lazy, it actually looks great when done well.
You can’t just slap a box anywhere on an image and hope for the best. White boxes need to be placed strategically so that they don’t cover important parts of the image and so that users do move to them in the course of looking at the design.
White boxes need to be big enough to contain a reasonable amount of text and you should have a plan for this element on smaller screens, such as allowing everything in the text box to drop below the main image. Don’t try to put a text box over an image on smaller screens because you’ll end up with a box of text that’s too small to read or the box will cover most of the image itself.
If you pot for the white box treatment, have fun. Each of the examples below use white boxes in completely different ways.
Do Space cuts a white box into the bottom corner of the image so that most of the image is visible. The white box bleeds into the white space below so that it almost looks like it comes up out of the panel below. This technique helps connect the main slider to the content below (and can even encourage scrolling).