Sizes
One of the most dramatic but underappreciated aspects of life on Earth is the incredible variety of sizes among organisms and objects. Starting from an orange plastic ball slipping out of a two-year-old’s tiny hands, to watching superheroes like Hulk signifying enormous strength. This correlation of colossal creatures and their strength followed in mythology as well. Growing up in an Indian household will introduce you to religious statues or places at an early stage in life wrapped in mythological stories. If you have ever visited Indian temples you will happen to notice that every lord has an animal or bird on their front gate. Whether it's swan, eagle, mouse, peacock or bull. In Indian mythology, they happen to serve their respective lords to act as their vehicle. Few of the Vishnu temples would have an eagle sculpture carved on its gate’s entrance. Where certain Ganesha temples would have an extraordinary size of a mouse. And not to forget the tortoise as well. When I was younger the first thought that would come across my mind after seeing a huge tortoise was that it’s also a guardian. Not even a single doubt would cross my mind about how in real life such a tiny creature would guard or serve the Lord. When it comes to Nandi. It is smaller than its actual size. Needless to mention that replicating its original size would occupy the entire space of that respective room.
The reason for me using religious references here is to emphasise the fact that from how long we have been doing this. Considering ancient temples were more driven by religious aspects and worship friendly. So playing with sizes in order to convey the message has been rooted in our consciousness for ages.
Maybe this is why the size of objects manipulate our mind that we happen to overlook their content/material/features. The classic simple ‘what’s heavier 1 ton of cotton or 1 ton of lead’’ quiz tickles a brain of many and decoys them to answer cotton (provided the questioner has used hand gestures ) So naturally, our brain tends to assume that respectively larger things in size are better, stronger, heavier.
This same rule applies to the typography guidelines used in paper or any digital platform. As the most important information should be in H1 which is generally bold and in a larger font size compared to the rest of the text.
Years of following this thread feel resisted and I stumble upon minimalism. Where ‘Less is more’ depicts the entire movement. And no wonder the revolution which started in the '60s is strongly influencing our current digital platform as well. Now that iOS and Android devices have also changed the appearance of the user interface, especially the setting menus of which the use of icons, borderlines, edges, and contrast elements have been reduced to a minimum. The density of the elements on the user interface has decreased. There is more whitespace or unoccupied screen space. Furthermore, in 2014, the icons from context menus of Samsung's TouchWiz applications were pruned.
Overall it might be a little difficult to connect elegance with huge and strength with small for some time. But we can channelise our mind in order to perceive an object without using filters of sizes.