Somebody made a complaint about social media that I hadn’t heard before. Instagram and other video modes restrict artistic expression by standardizing the video size. Is this a fussy artsy complaint? Not at all.
Real design always starts with proportion. The same basic parts can look better, or be more informative, when the proportions are right. You can’t just force each piece of a design to be the same size. Newspapers, magazines, even business forms, have to pay attention to relative sizes of sections and pieces. You want the important things to stand out, and you need enough room to write the necessary prices or descriptions. Badly designed forms force you to leave out words or use only two digits of a date. We know where that leads!
Example from autos:
The ’53 Rambler is an unsung masterpiece of good proportion. It looks like the ’53 big Nash, and it doesn’t look small. Other compacts at the time didn’t take account of proportion, so they looked squatty, justifying Bill Mitchell’s famous joke about ‘tailoring for a dwarf.’
The ’53 Hudson Jet looks squatty and dwarfish because its design was determined by corporate imperatives, not the vision of one designer.
I was faced with a similar problem in courseware just now, which is hardly ‘artistic’. I had rigged up an animation with all the necessary parts, including cochlea and brainstem and cortex, but the connecting lines were crammed in and confusing. I had to separate out the pieces and enlarge each on its own to avoid the confusion. When I try to force all images into the same size of rectangle, some are too sparse and some are too dense.
Here are two earlier examples showing different layouts:
Polistra's Mill 