How texture objects are scaled

I’m an experienced programmer, but new to unity. I’m trying to understand how an object created from a texture is scaled from very small (almost zero size) to much larger than the texture pixel dimensions.

What I expected to see was the default scale components for the texture object set to 1.0. Then to scale the texture larger, increase the scale values above 1.0 (e.g.2.0 = double size) and to scale the texture smaller, decrease the values towards 0.0 (the limit where the texture would disappear).

What I see is that the default scale components are 0.0. I can scale the object larger by increasing this number (1.0 seems to double the size), but I have found no way to scale it smaller. I’ve tried negative scale values, but these produce strange scalings that do not preserve shape.

I think I’m missing something here. Can anyone explain how I should be doing this.
.

GUITextures are a special case. The standard way of scaling them is to modify the Width and Height in the Pixel Inset values to whatever size in pixels you want it displayed.

As for planes in 3D space, the size will be in world units, and based on the default size of the object you have the texture attached to. A Plane game object is 10 x 10 world units (and starts out horizontal). The new Quad game object is a vertical plane 1 x 1 world units in size. There is also the CreatePlane editor script that allows the creation of planes in specified sizes, orientations, and anchors. You can scale planes proportionally like you suggest, though you have to get the axes right: XZ for Planes and XY for Quads.