The whisper problem
Walk through ten agency portfolios in a row and you’ll see roughly the same typography on each one. A neutral grotesque, ranged left, well-spaced, mid-weight. It’s safe. It reads. It also makes every site feel like a continuation of the last one.
We started with that. Three iterations of a clean grotesque hero. They all worked. They were also forgettable.
The pivot
The pivot was deciding the headline should do the work the photography would have done if we’d been a different kind of studio. The headline is the brand asset. Photography supports it.
That meant the headline needed to be large enough to fill the viewport on a 13-inch screen, heavy enough to register at first glance, and weird enough to remember after the tab closes. We ended up at a tightly-tracked tall narrow capital sans, set at 96–160px depending on the breakpoint, with a line-height: 85%.
What this rules out
Most photography. A heavy display face takes up the visual budget that photography would normally occupy. So you have two choices: cut the photography or cut the display.
We cut the photography. Where you’d expect a hero image, there’s just type. Where you’d expect a section break of photography, there’s a saturated colour block. The photography that remains is at human scale — team portraits, studio details, never a stock image of a city skyline.
What this enables
The colour palette can be more saturated, because there’s no photography fighting it for attention. The white space can be wider, because the type is doing the heavy lifting. The pages can be longer, because each section earns its scroll with a different colour and headline rather than the same generic image library.
What people get wrong about loud type
It’s not about size. A 200px headline in a flabby grotesque is just big — it’s not loud. Loud is the combination of a tight letter-spacing (try -0.01em), a compressed line-height (85%–90%), and a face with attitude. Anton is loud. Inter at 96px is not.
It’s also not about being aggressive. Loud headlines work because they’re confident, not because they’re shouting. The difference is whether the body text has room to breathe afterward. Loud headline + tight body = aggression. Loud headline + generous body = confidence.
Should you do this?
If your brand has a strong written voice — a real point of view — then yes. The type amplifies it. If your brand is “professional, trusted, customer-focused” then loud type will look like a costume on a clerk. Pick the type that matches the voice. If you don’t have a voice, fix that first.