Landing Pages: Tone References

[anmhuicin]

I’ve been taking a look at the tone of the landing pages for other FOSS projects. The UX Design Institute suggests four useful axes for product interface tone:

• Funny vs. serious. Are you communicating with humour, playfulness, and lightheartedness, or is your tone more dry and business-like?
• Formal vs. casual. Do you communicate with professionalism, using a lot of industry-specific jargon or do you address your audience in a more familiar style?
• Respectful vs. irrerevent. Are you polite and deferent, or quirky and edgy?
• Enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact. Do you appeal to your audience’s emotions, or take a more neutral, straightforward tone?

Let’s take a look at other FOSS landing pages, one-by-one.

[anmhuicin]

Godot

• Funny 20% / Serious 80%. The tone is warm, without being particularly humourous. Playfulness is mostly at the level of the iconography and game screenshots used.

  

• Formal 30% / Casual 70%. The language used is warm, welcome, and pretty casual (lots of exclamation marks, the word “awesome”), without being overbearingly so (no emojis, thankfully). There’s some jargon (“Keep your code modular with an object-oriented API”).

• Respectful 90% / Irreverent 10%. The tone is user-centric and polite. They want to inspire trust and confidence.

• Enthusiastic 75% / Matter-of-fact 25%. They use a lot of adjectives (“Simple and powerful 3D”, “Innovative design”, “the right language for the job”). There’s a strong appeal to emotion in “help create a game engine that belongs to everybody”. Matter-of-factness comes mostly at the level of describing features (“Godot’s dedicated 2D rendering engine with real 2D pixel coordinates”), but even these are couched in appeals to emotion (“Make crisp and performat 2D games”).

[anmhuicin]

Blender

• Funny 30% / Serious 70%. There’s an immediate splash of humour accompanying the key visual (“Your new best friend”), and playful touches throughout (“Story Art, Drawing 2D in 3D – Really!”). The humour doesn’t detract from the message, though.
• Formal 25% / Casual 75%. The tone is warm and inviting: “It’s about people.”, “Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze.” Formality is mostly at the level of descriptions of features and tools.
• Respectful 80% / Irreverent 20%. There’s a splash of irreverence (“Really!”), but the overall tone is respectful and user-focused.
• Enthusiastic 80% / Matter-of-fact 20%. Positive adjectives predominate (“unsurpassed workflow freedom”, “the best tracker in the market”, “comprehensive array of modeling tools”, “stunning ultra-realistic rendering”). There’s a strong appeal to emotion around the Blender community (“Designers, developers, engineers, artists. All driven by passion. All using Blender to make an impact.”)

[anmhuicin]

Ubuntu Desktop

• Funny 0% / Serious 100%. Not a whiff of humour here. The language is all business.
• Formal 60% / Casual 40%. The level of formality isn’t daunting, but there is a lot of jargon used, only some of which is explained (“LTS stands for long-term support — which means five years of free security and maintenance updates”). Prospective users may struggle with “GNOME 46 with support for quarter screen tiling”, for example.
• Respectful 100% / Irreverent 0%. The overall tone is straightforward, user-focused, and respectful.
• Enthusiastic 25% / Matter-of-fact 75%. This is a landing-page, so there’s definitely some marketing hype (“The open source desktop operating system that powers millions of PCs and laptops”, “Enhanced installer with improved encryption options”, “a comprehensive subscription delivering enterprise-grade security”), but most of the page is factual descriptions of features.

[anmhuicin]

Python

• Funny 10% / Serious 90%. There’s a little bit of playfulness in “Python knows the usual control flow statements that other languages speak — if, for, while and range — with some of its own twists”, but the overall vibe is authoritative and factual.
• Formal 30% / Casual 70%. The language is casual, welcoming, and not overly daunting (use of exclamation marks, the community board being “the place to go”, the straightforward description of Python as “a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively.”) By virtue of it being the landing page for a programming language, there is some jargon.
• Respectful 90% / Irreverent 10%. The overall tone is respectful, with splashes of irreverence in some of the humour.
• Enthusiastic 40% / Matter-of-fact 60%. There are some appeals to emotion (“it’s easy to learn and use Python”), but the vibe is factual: here is what Python is and what it can do.

[anmhuicin]

This last one isn’t a FOSS project, but as it has an excellent landing page I felt it would be remiss not to include it.

Unreal Engine

• Funny 20% / Serious 80%. There’s not much in the way of explicit humour here, but there is a playfulness at the level of wordplay that’s really effective: “We make the engine. ⁠You make it Unreal.”
• Formal 25% / Casual 75%. There’s surprisingly little jargon. The page is aimed at a broad audience interested in what they can make with the tool.
• Respectful 80% / Irreverent 20%: Largely respectful, with a splash of playfulness.
• Enthusiastic 75% / Matter-of-fact 25%: The page has a great mix of emotive language designed to make the engine sound as appealing as possible (“Unreal Engine comes standard with everything you need to help you make it real”, “Power that can keep up with the wildest imaginations”), and matter-of-fact information like tutorials (the “How to install” section) and links to documentation.

[anmhuicin]

@AnTulcha Any thoughts? The Blender and Unreal landing pages stood out the most to me. Blender is obviously aimed at a somewhat narrower audience than Unreal, while still having a lot of outreach potential (animators, 3D modellers, game devs, etc.) so it might be an interesting case study for us. Both landing pages are very good at balancing playfulness and information while avoiding the trap of sounding grating or overly irreverent.

[AnTulcha]

Thanks for all the research on this @anmhuicin! I’d say the Celbridge docs should lie somewhere between the Godot and Blender styles. We’re appealing to both coders and content creators, so that mix feels about right to me.