The significance of seven seems to cross cultural, spiritual, and practical domains. 7 notes, 7 colors of rainbow, 7 deadly sins, 7 days of the week… The 2 power 7 (128 ) is the number of phonemes in most of human languages .
The number seven seems to have a fascinating connection to human cognition, and there are a few key theories to explain why it might feel "optimal" or special:
Short-term Memory Capacity: Renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller suggested in his classic 1956 paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two that the human mind has a capacity to handle about seven items in short-term memory. This limitation might explain why lists, groupings, or concepts of seven feel manageable and memorable.
Pattern Recognition: Seven strikes a balance between simplicity and complexity—it’s just enough to challenge our cognitive abilities without overwhelming them. Whether it's musical notes or colors in a rainbow, seven offers variety but avoids excess.
Cultural Reinforcement: Over centuries, the symbolic and spiritual significance of seven has been ingrained into human society. This ubiquity may make our minds naturally attuned to recognizing and organizing concepts in groups of seven.
Does this strike a chord with you? Or do you think there's another layer to seven's mystique?
The HTML5 have given a 7 as a magic count for variations of web safe fonts, font size, font weight, font variant, font variant caps.
In UX in order to have a clear distinction on variations of theme entity, the number of variations need to be limited and the “distance” between variations maximized for better visual recognition of each especially when those shown next to each other. The seven variations is the golden rule there.
