Open any well-made dresser and the drawers grow: a shallow drawer for socks at the top, deep ones for sweaters below. The graduation is not decoration — shallow drawers are genuinely more useful for small things, and a bank of equal drawers wastes the top of the case on a deep box nobody can fill sensibly. But graduation done by eye usually fails: fronts that grow by a constant amount (4″, 5″, 6″, 7″) look top-heavy and mechanical, because the eye reads proportion, not inches.
The traditional solution, written up in Fine Woodworking and used on period furniture for centuries, is a geometric progression: each front is the previous one times a constant ratio — 4″, 4.8″, 5.8″, 6.9″ at a ratio of 1.2. The eye reads the steady ratio as one calm rhythm, and the series can be solved exactly: pick the top front and the count, and the ratio that makes the fronts sum precisely to your opening falls out. That solving is what our Drawer Size Calculator automates (it also does equal fronts, for the projects that want them).
Graduate the fronts; the boxes follow the fronts minus your reveal and slide clearance. Keep the ratio gentle — 1.15 to 1.3 covers most cases; past 1.4 the bottom drawer becomes a laundry bin. And decide the top front from what it must hold: the top drawer is the one you open daily, so size it for its contents and let the series grow from there.