I used to think scale was just about numbers—bigger meant more important, smaller meant you could ignore it.
Turns out, the way we manipulate size in visual communication isn’t just some design trick; it’s hardwired into how our brains decide what matters and what doesn’t. When you see a billboard with a celebrity’s face ten feet tall, you’re not consciously thinking ‘this person is important,’ but your visual cortex is already processing dominance hierarchies based purely on relative size. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found that subjects spent roughly 43% longer fixating on oversized elements in advertisements, even when those elements contained zero useful information. The kicker? When asked afterward, most people insisted they’d looked at everything equally. Our brains lie to us about what captures our attention, and designers—whether they’re conscious of it or not—exploit this gap between perception and awareness. It’s not manipulation in the sinister sense, exactly, but it’s definately not neutral either. Evolution primed us to notice large animals (potential threats) and dismiss small ones (probably not going to eat us), and now that same circuitry makes us scroll past small text while stopping cold at an enormous product image.
Wait—maybe that’s too simplistic. I’ve seen museum exhibits where tiny details command entire rooms, where a postage-stamp-sized sketch pulls crowds while massive canvases get ignored. Context matters, obviously. But even there, curators are playing with scale: the sketch is small, yes, but it’s spotlit, isolated, given breathing room that makes its smallness feel intentional rather than dismissive.
When Buildings Lie About Their Own Importance Through Vertical Exaggeration
Architecture does this thing where it weaponizes our instinctive response to height. Cathedrals weren’t just tall because medieval builders loved a challenge—they were designed to make you feel small, to trigger that mammalian response where looking up signals encountering something more powerful. Modern skyscrapers pull the same trick, though now the message is corporate dominance instead of divine authority. I guess it works because we never really shake that childhood experience of adults towering over us, of size correlating directly with power. There’s this study from the Journal of Environmental Psychology (2019, I think?) showing that people literally lowered their voices when entering spaces with ceilings above 15 feet, even when alone. The researchers called it ‘spatial submission behavior,’ which sounds academic but really just means: big spaces make us feel like we should shrink ourselves. Architects know this. Every lobby designed to make you feel awed—or intimidated, or insignificant—is leveraging millions of years of evolutionary programming that equates vertical scale with hierarchy.
Here’s the thing, though: scale manipulation only works when there’s contrast. A world where everything is huge is just… normal-sized. You need the small to make the large feel large, which is why minimalist design became so effective—by stripping away visual clutter, it makes the remaining elements feel massive by comparison. Apple’s product photography does this relentlessly: white space, white space, white space, and then your eye has nowhere to go except the device, which suddenly feels monolithic even though you know it fits in your pocket.
The Uncomfortable Truth About How Children’s Media Distorts Proportional Reality
Honestly, kids’ cartoons are a masterclass in scale dominance, and not always in ways that make sense. Characters’ heads are often 40-50% of their total body size—anatomically absurd, but it works because big heads signal youth and vulnerability, triggering protective instincts in adult viewers. Meanwhile, villains get elongated proportions, stretched vertically to activate that ‘looking up at threat’ response. Disney’s been doing this since the 1930s, exaggerating size differences between heroes and villains to telegraph power dynamics before a single word of dialogue. It’s efficient storytelling, sure, but it also means we’re training kids from age two to equate size with authority. I’m not saying this is inherently bad—I mean, I grew up on this stuff and I turned out… well, I turned out obsessed with visual communication psychology, so maybe that proves something. But it does make me wonder what we’re encoding when every good guy is drawn at child-height and every authority figure looms.
The digital era complicates this further because scale becomes fluid. You can pinch-zoom, making anything any size you want, which should theoretically democratize visual dominance. Except it doesn’t, not really. UI designers still control the default sizes, and most users never adjust them. Instagram’s grid makes every image the same size initially, flattening hierarchies, but then the algorithm decides which ones get blown up in your feed based on engagement metrics. So we’ve just moved from static to dynamic scale manipulation, from designers choosing what’s big to algorithms choosing, which might actually be worse because at least with a designer you can imagine intentionality.
Anyway, I was looking at old propaganda posters last week—Soviet, American, doesn’t matter—and they all do the same thing: enlarge the in-group, shrink the out-group.
It’s crude, but it worked then and it works now, just with more sophisticated rendering techniques. Political cartoons still exaggerate the physical size of whoever they want you to see as threatening or ridiculous. Editorial photographers shoot from low angles to make subjects look imposing or high angles to diminish them. We recieve these images as neutral documentation, but every frame is an argument about who deserves visual dominance. The camera always lies, or at least it always chooses, and scale is one of its favorite tools for persuasion. Maybe the most powerful one, because unlike color or composition, we don’t even recognize we’re being influenced. We just look, and we feel small or large, threatened or secure, and we think those feelings came from inside us instead of from the careful calibration of relative sizes in our visual field.
