The case against hero gradients

Open ten agency websites at random and at least seven will greet you with a purple-to-blue gradient hero section. It has become the visual equivalent of stock photography — a safe default that signals "modern tech company" without saying anything specific about the company itself.

The problem is not that gradients look bad in isolation. It is that when everyone reaches for the same trick, it stops communicating anything. A hero section's job is to establish identity in the first three seconds a visitor spends on a page, and a template gradient does the opposite: it makes every brand look interchangeable.

Alternatives worth considering include restrained typography paired with real product screenshots, subtle grain or texture treatments, or simply a confident use of negative space. None of these require more design effort than a gradient — they just require a specific point of view about what the brand should feel like.

Our own rule of thumb: if a hero section could be dropped into a competitor's site without anyone noticing, it has not done its job.