In this article, a new mechanism to spread the solutions generated by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is proposed. This approach is based on the use of stripes that are applied in objective function space and is independent of the search engine adopted. Additionally, it overcomes some of the drawbacks of other previous proposals such as the epsilon-dominance method. In order to validate the proposed approach, it is coupled to a multi-objective particle swarm optimizer and its performance is assessed with respect to that of state-of-the-art algorithms, using standard test problems and performance measures taken from the specialized literature. The results indicate that the proposed approach is a viable diversity maintenance mechanism that can be incorporated to any multi-objective metaheuristic used for multi-objective optimization.