Most early-stage SaaS sites converge on the same five visual decisions: a hero with a centered headline, a screenshot floating on a purple-blue gradient, a three-up "features" grid, a pricing table with the middle tier highlighted in a brighter color, and a quote from someone with a generated headshot. The convergence is real — and it's downstream of the same prompts the same set of AI tools answer the same way.
We made a different set of decisions, deliberately. Recording them here because each one is also a product decision in disguise.
Editorial, not dashboard
The product is a writing tool. The marketing site is a writing sample. If a visitor lands on the homepage and the first thing they see is a hero rendered in a typeface that looks generated by a marketing-AI-circa-2024, they correctly conclude the product was generated the same way.
So: Playfair Display in italic for emphasis. JetBrains Mono for eyebrows and labels. Geist Sans for body. The numbers exist; the story is missing — and the story is the thing the product writes. We treat the homepage typography the way the report treats the page it's writing.
One accent, used sparingly
Coral. One color, applied to (a) the punchline word in any italic display headline, (b) primary CTAs, (c) section dot indicators. That's it.
Most marketing sites apply five accent colors and call it a system. The constraint forces a different kind of decision: when should coral show up? Answer: only when the eye should land somewhere. If three things on a section claim coral, none of them get attention. If one does, you read it twice.
Same rule applies inside the product. The system never adds coral to make a card "feel premium" — coral marks the thing that's about to ask for your decision.
No hype words
Forbidden in copy: revolutionize, supercharge, unlock, transform, game-changing, AI-powered. They're the linguistic version of the gradient mesh. The agencies we want as customers can spot them at a hundred paces and tune out for the rest of the page.
What replaces them: the senior-strategist register. Declarative sentences. Specific numbers when we have them; explicit hypothesis tags when we don't. "We replaced four hours of Slides with twelve minutes of review" is a claim a customer can verify. "Studio supercharges your reporting workflow" is a claim a customer can ignore.
Restraint over decoration
Hairline borders, generous whitespace, considered alignment. Gradients reserved for the warm-glow hero background. Drop shadows reserved for elevated surfaces (popovers, modals, sticky toolbars). Decoration is a last resort, never a first one.
When we ship a section, we ask: would removing this make the page worse? The number of times the answer was "no" surprised us into a much sparer site than the first draft.
Why this matters
A reporting tool has to look like the kind of tool a strategist wants their work associated with. If our marketing site reads as one of fifty SaaS pages from the same template, our product appears to be one of fifty SaaS products from the same template — even when it isn't. The visual identity carries the value claim before the copy gets to.