Boxes contain extra handles on the inside when selected. Grab any of these inner handles to change its padding, which is displayed in green.

By adjusting the padding, you can create breathing room between the box’s content and it’s borders, preventing elements from feeling cramped or cluttered. This differs from margin which is used to create space between smaller elements.

Using padding overlays

Padding can also be applied using the padding panel in the sidebar.

Using the padding sidebar property

You can also easily remove a box’s padding by clicking the blue Padding label in the panel and selecting “Reset to base”.

Reset padding to base

Examples

Cards

Use padding to ensure content is not touching the edge of the card. This will make the card more visually appealing and easier to read. This is also easier to manage as opposed to applying width on each individual element within the card.

Using padding to make room

Pro tip

Avoid using padding instead of width for boxes. Width allows your element to resize responsively while maintaining a limit to prevent it from becoming too wide on larger screens. Padding is a hard pixel value that does not automatically get reduced and will cause your content to be squished on smaller devices.

Shortcuts

While dragging the handles or inputs, hold the ⌥ Option or Alt key to equally change padding on both sides of an element. Hold ⇧ Shift + ⌥ Option or Alt to equally change padding for all sides.

⌥ Option (or Alt) hotkey

Developer notes

You can give your team control over the padding property for any custom component using the Style control.