Built designs always look too large compared to designs

Hello everyone.

Designer here.

I’m designing sites on Figma and then my development team are building them. This is less of a Figma question and more of a design question.

A common bit of feedback we get once the designs are built and on the development site is that everything looks too big - as if everything is zoomed in (we’ve checked, everyone is at 100% scale on their browsers).

I’m struggling to find resources or discussion online addressing this but coming up short.

The developers generally use laptops and I presume the clients are usually also using laptops to view the sites. I design on the larger 27 inch imac.

My base body copy is 16pt for example - following all guidelines that suggest this to be a solid choice. I try to largely stick to a 8px design system for type. The developers set 1 rem to be 8px - body copy is set to 2 rem. However once built it just looks ‘big’.

I’m really struggling to see where things are going wrong here. Is it my designs? Is it the implementation of them? It’s likely both is my assumption!

When you zoom out to around 80% scale in browser things start looking a little more ‘normal’ is the feedback that was received.

Does anyone have any advice or come across similar issues when their designs have been translated to build by developers?

Thanks!