No. 34 “The hierarchy is off.”

I can’t tell what matters most.

Hierarchy is the order your eye reads things: first, second, third. When everything is the same size, nothing wins.

Make one thing clearly the boss.

Pick the one thing. Make it biggest.

Hierarchy comes from Greek for “sacred rule.”

Around 500 AD, a writer we now call Pseudo-Dionysius used it to rank the nine orders of angels.

By the 1610s it meant any ranked order. Designers rank headlines instead.

• Etymonline, “hierarchy”
• Wikipedia, “De Coelesti Hierarchia”

Save this for the next time everything on the page is shouting.