Weight and colour before size
Why expensive-looking sites are calm and amateur sites are loud.
Not filmed yet
The lesson is written out below. The video comes after.
Here is a thing you can see on any page once someone points it out.
Hierarchy — this matters more than that — can be expressed several ways. Size is one. Weight is another. Colour and contrast is a third. Space around a thing is a fourth, and it is the most underrated.
Amateur work uses size almost exclusively. The heading is big, so the subheading has to be fairly big to compete, so the body has to be readable against both, and now everything on the page is loud and nothing leads. Expensive-looking work leans on the quieter levers: same size, more weight. Same weight, more contrast. Same everything, more room around it.
That is most of the difference between a page that feels calm and a page that feels cheap, and it is a smaller change than people expect.
The one thing to keep
Most people express hierarchy only through size, which forces everything to shout.