What if these tech companies told the truth?

By Joseph Foley
published

12 web designs get hilariously honest makeovers.

We all know that marketing can put a spin on a company's products and services, sometimes making them seem more useful or easier to use. But what if companies took a different approach? What if the display copy on tech brands' homepages was completely, utterly frank.

Well, someone's decided to take a look at what that might look like. The Taiwan-based writer Jovian Gautama has cheekily mocked up the website designs of a bunch of companies, reworking them to include refreshingly honest taglines. And he shared the hilarious results in the Twitter feed below.

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'Good luck trying to figure out our pricing,' Webflow says. 'Start a Twitter flame war with your opinion,' is the suggested tagline for Substack. Netflix? 'Here's another show with Ricky Gervais'. 

Wordpress is made to proclaim, 'We own the goddam internet', Readwise aims to 'Let people know you read books' and Coinbase reaches out to the crypto bros with 'WAGMI... right guys? Right?' (we are all going to make it, for the uninitiated). Hyperfury is 'the Twitter tool that didn't get banned', and OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E 2, simply exclaims 'Oh s**t, oh f**k, what have we done?'

Others have joined in the fun with web design mockups of their own, and some have shared real-world examples of surprisingly honest copy.

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A mock web design with honest marketing copy
Some of the examples of 'honest marketing copy' on the Twitter thread (click right for more) (Image credit: Jovian Gautama on Twitter)

It's interesting to compare how this looks to the excruciating examples of intentionally bad marketing that we've seen, in which companies affect a faux-honest (or even sarcastic) voice to try to come across as rebellious. Gautama's examples are a lot more amusing because in many cases they're totally true.

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Joseph Foley
Joseph Foley

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news and features, updates buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment for creatives, from monitors to accessories and office supplies. A writer and translator, he also works as a project manager at London and Buenos Aires-based design and branding agency Hermana Creatives, where he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing photography, video content, graphic design and collaterals for the hospitality sector. He enjoys photography, particularly nature photography, wellness and he dances Argentine tango.