There is a line scrolling across our home page: "No clichéd tech imagery. Just IT that works." People ask what we mean by it. We mean these.
In short
Every IT website uses the same six stock pictures. You have seen all of them.
They exist because IT is hard to photograph, not because anybody likes them.
What tells you about an IT company is how it talks to you, not its pictures.
The hooded hacker
He types in the dark, in a hoodie, occasionally in a balaclava, which must make the screen hard to see. In real life, the person after your studio's money is in a bright office with a script and a target, sending the same email to ten thousand firms before lunch. Much less photogenic.
The glowing padlock
Blue, floating, usually inside a shield, sometimes inside a second shield. It means "security" in the way a picture of a tick means "quality". Nobody has ever been made safer by one.
The handshake in front of a server
Two people in suits shake hands in a room full of blinking lights. Real server rooms are loud, cold and locked, and the last thing anybody does in one is agree a deal. (In the interest of honesty: there is a handshake photo on our own contact form. No servers were involved.)
The team pointing at a screen
Five colleagues gathered round one monitor, all delighted, one of them pointing. Nobody has ever been that happy about a spreadsheet. In a real studio, five people round one screen means something has gone wrong.
The cloud with arrows
A cartoon cloud with arrows going up and down. The cloud is somebody else's computer in a warehouse. A drawing of a warehouse would be more honest, and nobody would click on it.
The wall of green code
Borrowed from a film that came out in 1999. If your IT person's screen looks like this, either they are watching the film or something has gone very wrong.
Why everyone uses them
Because the real thing is invisible. Good IT looks like nothing happening: no outage, no lost file, no phone call. You cannot photograph a Tuesday where everything worked. So the industry reaches for the padlock.
What we do instead
Words, mostly. Plain ones, in orange and black, with a typewriter font for the small print. We would rather tell you clearly what we do and what happens when you call.
Want IT that is as plain as the website?
No hoodies and no padlocks. Someone who answers, explains it in English and fixes it. Talk to us, or read what we offer.