Jason Long, designer at PlanetScale

PlanetScale recently launched a website with a text-heavy visual style. I spoke to the designer at PlanetScale to learn more about this decision.

Insights:

Enterprise Focus: Text-only design matches shift to large-scale enterprise clients, away from hobbyists.
Resource Efficiency: Minimal site frees up designer’s time for product work.
Hierarchy Challenge: Single font size required subtle styling for clear content structure.
Flexible Content Width: Broader width chosen for future complex forms and sidebars.
Lower Maintenance: No app screenshots means fewer frequent updates needed.

What led to the decision to take this “text-only” approach?

Our decision to go in the direction coincided with discontinuing our free plan. We made the decision to focus on our larger customers all the way up to enormous enterprises. Hobbyists were no longer a focus.

We felt like we could exit the hype cycle of feeling pressure to design a marketing site that has more shadows, light beams, animations, etc. Our target audience isn’t dazzled with that. They want to know their database company is serious, rock solid, and has experience dealing with workloads larger than their own. We wanted to let our tech and customer logos do the talking rather than razzle dazzle.

Putting out a dirt simple site let’s us focus our limited resources (I’m the only designer in the company) on our product.

Did you explore other options?

We started with some very minimal designs but they felt like they were in the uncanny valley—simple, but not truly minimal. It was our CEO’s decision to see if it was feasible to do a plain text design that felt like a man page.

The site uses dashed lines in the footer but solid lines for the grid of customer logos. Why is that?

The dashed lines were a way of making the footer more of a secondary element in comparison to the logo grid which is our hero piece.

Were there any surprising challenges as you designed this?

Biggest challenge was (still is) around page hierarchy. I only wanted to use one font size (like you’re viewing in a terminal) so headings were challenging. The h1/h2/h3/etc headings use a mix of slightly different grays and weights, plus underline. The h1s get a slight flourish with an orange bar to help anchor the content.

Monospace text is wider which makes having a sidebar tricky (like on the blog posts). Having a sidebar requires it being fairly narrow. [On pages where we don’t show a sidebar], line lengths of the main content can run longer than ideal at wider breakpoints.

Why not use a narrower content width so that lines are not as long?

If we only had plain text content, I think a narrower page container would probably be better. But having a pricing page with a monospace form (which will soon grow in complexity) and a blog page which benefits from a sidebar for a table of contents, I wanted a content container that would work with everything.

Were there any trade-offs you had to make now that you’ve taken out most images?

No real trade-offs. We still may end up showing screenshots of the app either there or on a subpage, but overall we’re leaning on our credibility and capabilities here rather than showing the app UI.

Also, it’s less maintenance not having screenshots that become out of date.

There is an ASCII-style flow-chart on the home page. How did you create that?

We used https://monodraw.helftone.com.