Universal measurements for seats?

I am just barely getting into designing furniture in SL. But one thing has me puzzled, is there an accepted size for seats? Just the 1M block doesn't seem comfortable enough, but when lengthening it, it then looks to big. How do you furniture guru's decide how big a seat should be?

Granted, there is a lot more to building furniture, but everything I have built so far looks either too small to sit in, or too big to be comfortable.

Good question -- well a good way to find out would be to find pieces of furniture you already enjoy, and check their measurements out. There are some specific allowance (furry-optimized chairs may have more roominess for a tail) and you can do some really cool, wacky stuff with crazy proportions -- look at Cherabim Xia's stuff for an example -- but you can go to Reverie in Chartreuse, Timherry Island (private island), L'Utopie (private island)... they are shining examples... lots of fab furni to check out.

Easy, just make a cube and sit on it. Then raise or lower the cube until your feet just barely touch the ground. Now you have your seat height. After that, build the chair around your seated av. I suggest making it slightly oversized to accomodate larger avatars, but generally speaking, if you use your av as the building template you can't go wrong.

It depends if you use / can use custom poses.

Usually i design them by 'eye', resizing them afterwards to fit av height, and adapt pose.
If an avie look 'unnatural' on them, I usually design a custom pose to fit the avie to the chair, instead of the other way around.

Thanks for all the feedback! I will start desiging some with these in mind when I get home from work!

Another great designer is Taeja Diaz of Taeja Vu Designs. She has a store in Federal.