The white space is there to parse information in a meaningful way. Starting a new class in the bottom eighth of a page would be annoying to me.
Cutting the art would be a mistake. Many people like and many others take it for granted. Art in a book is the equivalent of background music in a TV show or movie. Watch one without the background music and you will probably be distracted by the feeling that something is wrong. The music adds imagery and the art in RPGs usually offers inspiration. Without it you would see many more complaints about 4E reading like a textbook.
You don't need a single bit of the art in the powers pages. They break up the powers causing a level to spill over to a new page. Yeah they are still powers for that class, but if you are going to have them organized by class and allow them to spill over, then get them together and cut out the art to make more meaningful use of the space.
If it were just full page art that would be different for the flashy shiny aspect but it is 3/4 opened book art in case where half a page is lost because the art takes more than a single page. That is excessive.
Hoe many pages could have been saved and add more content, reduce cost of the product, and production cost, etc by cutting the art back to proper proportions.
Don't have art spanning both open pages, and take art of of the stat block pages.
I don't mean remove all the art, but that which exist poorly throughout the book just to waste space.
I mean every class/race has half page art, each chapter has dual page art.
I don't even want to could the art in the powers pages. Each image is about 1/4 page, enough room to move at least one power up to the previous page. Sometimes with the art and white space there was enough room for 3 powers.
It is poor publishing and design the amount of landscape on the pages that are wasted. Look at the top and bottom margins of the page and compare those with the 1st 2nd edition books and you see similar wastes of space.
The design reminds me of the Complete series of books from 2nd with the header and footer space unused.
Maybe it helps when reading in bed, but at a table the book doesn't reuire thumbspace to hold it open at the bottom ot top, a whole hand can be used on the opposing edge.
These is probably enough room to add a whole other class and race into the PHB.
