I redesigned 1Password's homepage. Here's every decision I made and why.

Why this one

I picked 1Password because three things are true at once:

1. It's a category leader with serious revenue. Hundreds of millions in ARR, ~150,000 business customers, $7B valuation as of 2024. This isn't punching down.
2. The current homepage is a tier behind its peers. Compared to what Stripe, Linear, Notion, and Vercel are shipping in 2026, it reads as a 2021-era site.
3. The product is genuinely great. A weak homepage on a strong product is the most interesting case to redesign, the work is about closing a credibility gap, not fixing the product.

This is purely a concept exercise. No relationship with 1Password. They didn't ask for this. The point is to show how I think through a redesign, with one specific company as the example.

The current state, what's there now

I'm going to be specific without being mean. The current 1Password homepage (as of June 2026):

• Hero headline is feature-led rather than outcome-led. It mentions what 1Password is, a password manager, but doesn't frame why in a way that competes with the urgency a security buyer feels.
• Hero visual is a product screenshot, which is the right call, but it's a flat marketing render rather than something that feels alive.
• Social proof is below the fold. Logo bar appears after the hero, after a long features section. The first viewport has no third-party credibility signal.
• Multiple competing CTAs. "Get started" + "Talk to sales" + small secondary links. Not catastrophic but not clean.
• Pricing is in the nav but the page is feature-led, not outcome-led. Standard tier comparison rather than "best for teams that..." framing.
• Type and color are conservative. Reads as enterprise-safe rather than category-defining.

The current site is not bad. It just isn't doing the work it could be doing for a product this strong, at a moment when the rest of the SaaS category has visibly leveled up.

Decision 1: The hero headline

What I'd write:

"The security layer running underneath your team."

Subhead:

"Passwords, passkeys, secrets, SSH keys, and developer credentials, managed in one place, used by 150,000+ companies."

Why this works.

The current headline names the category (password manager). My version repositions 1Password from "a tool you use" to "infrastructure that runs underneath everything." That's a different conceptual frame, and it matches where the product has actually grown to (secrets management, developer credentials, passkeys, SSO integration). The product evolved; the positioning didn't.

The subhead does three jobs at once: lists the actual capability surface (passwords, passkeys, secrets, SSH, dev creds) so technical buyers see themselves, names the audience (your team), and drops social proof (150,000+ companies) before the visitor even has to scroll.

Reading level: grade 6. Length: under the 12-word ceiling for high-converting heroes. Specific enough to differentiate from LastPass or Bitwarden, abstract enough to hold up across customer segments.

Decision 2: The hero visual

What I'd build.

A live product surface, not a screenshot. Specifically: a fake-but-functional 1Password Watchtower view rendered in HTML, showing "12 reused passwords detected," "3 compromised accounts," "47 weak passwords flagged", with small live-looking animations (numbers ticking, checks fading in). Behind it, a subtle terminal panel showing op CLI commands running, signaling the developer audience that 1Password isn't just for the marketing team.

Why this works.

The Linear playbook applied to security. Linear renders a working theatrical demo on its homepage, fake Slack threads, fake Codex output, an MP3 you can actually play. It signals confidence: we'll show you the product working, not a polished marketing render. For a security product, this is a stronger signal than any logo bar. It says "we're so confident in the surface area we'll show you the watchtower view that catches real problems."

The terminal panel is intentional. 1Password's biggest growth vector is developer tools (op CLI, secrets management for production). Most homepage visitors don't realize this. Putting the CLI in the hero, even subtly, opens a new audience perception without losing the existing buyer.

Decision 3: Social proof, immediately

What I'd build.

Directly under the hero, a single horizontal strip with:

• Logo bar: Slack, GitHub, IBM, Under Armour, Shopify, PagerDuty, Intercom, Asana (8 logos, all recognizable, scrolling marquee on mobile).
• Single inline quote in the Vercel style: "Slack rolled out 1Password to 4,000 employees in two weeks." Or whatever the real best case study sentence is.
• Stat band: 150K+ businesses · 100M+ users · 99.99% uptime · SOC 2 Type 2

Why this works.

CXL eye-tracking research is clear: social proof works near the hero, near a CTA, or at a point of friction. Below the fold it's invisible. The current 1Password homepage puts social proof in the middle of the page where most visitors never reach.

The Vercel-style inline quote is the highest-engagement format I've audited in the last 12 months. A single specific number from a recognizable company outperforms a logo wall and an anonymous testimonial. "Slack rolled out 1Password to 4,000 employees in two weeks" tells the visitor: this works at scale, this works fast, recognizable buyers picked us.

Decision 4: CTAs

What I'd ship.

Hero: one primary button, "Start a free trial", and one secondary text link, "Talk to sales →". That's it. No "Watch demo." No "See pricing." No "Learn more."

Nav: Product, Solutions (drops down to teams/developers/enterprise), Pricing, Customers, Sign In, Start free trial.

Why this works.

One primary CTA per page. The secondary path (talk to sales) is for the enterprise buyer who's coming in through a different funnel, they need a sales conversation, not a self-serve trial. Pricing is in the nav (one click away, satisfies the 62% disqualification problem). Demo is removed entirely, the homepage is the demo because of decision 2.

The math: 1Password's current homepage probably has 4–5 CTAs above the fold. Cutting to 1 + 1 should produce a measurable lift just on its own.

Decision 5: Type and color

What I'd pick.

• Headlines: Söhne Breit Halbfett (or Geist Sans medium) at 72–96px, tight tracking (-0.02em).
• Body: Söhne Buch (or Inter) at 16–18px, generous line-height (1.5–1.6).
• Mono: Söhne Mono or JetBrains Mono for terminal panels and code snippets.
• Color: Dark mode default. Pure black canvas (#0A0A0A), elevated surfaces (#141414), 1Password blue accent (#0572EC) but used sparingly. Warm white (#F5F4EE) text. One accent color for the watchtower alerts (a calibrated red, #FF4D4F or similar).

Why this works.

Dark mode by default for two reasons. One: developer audience. Every premium developer tool in 2026 is dark-default (Vercel, Linear, Cursor, Raycast). Two: it signals "serious tool." Light mode reads as productivity SaaS for marketing teams. Dark mode reads as infrastructure.

Söhne (or Geist as the OFL alternative) does the heavy lifting because it's what every premium SaaS in this tier uses, Stripe, OpenAI, Substack, Pitch all use Söhne. There's a reason. It has the geometric authority of Helvetica with the warmth of Akzidenz-Grotesk. It looks expensive without trying.

The accent color discipline is the hardest part. Most security product sites lean heavily on blue and end up looking like every Microsoft product since 2015. The Vercel approach, pure grayscale chrome with color reserved for product output (alerts, status, real data), would let 1Password's blue become meaningful again instead of decorative.

Decision 6: Below the fold

What I'd structure.

Six sections, in this order:

1. "What 1Password actually manages now", visual grid of capabilities (passwords, passkeys, secrets, SSH, dev creds, browser autofill, MFA, biometric login). Counters the assumption that 1Password is "just a password manager."
2. "Built for teams that take security seriously", three audience-specific value props (Engineering, IT/Security, Marketing/Ops), each with one named customer quote and one screenshot.
3. The developer story, op CLI section. Real code snippets. GitHub Actions integration. This is the under-marketed surface area of the product.
4. "Starting at $7.99/user/mo", pricing teaser with three tiers, a recommended highlight, and a "see full pricing" link.
5. Trust and compliance, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP. Single horizontal band. Critical for enterprise buyers.
6. One final CTA with a stronger framing, "The security layer your team should already have. Start free for 14 days. No credit card."

Why this order.

The current homepage front-loads features. My version front-loads what the product is for, then differentiates by audience, then handles objections (developer trust, compliance, pricing). The final CTA is stronger than the hero CTA because by that point the visitor is more committed and the friction tolerance is higher, you can ask for the email.

The Linear principle

The most under-used pattern in SaaS homepages is putting the actual product in the hero as a working surface, not a screenshot. Linear made this canonical. Notion does it. Cursor does it. Most enterprise SaaS still defaults to flat product renders. That gap is the single biggest design lift available right now.

What I wouldn't do

A few things I'd deliberately not change.

• Wouldn't drop the blue brand color entirely. 1Password's blue is recognizable equity. I'd just use it less, and more deliberately.
• Wouldn't add an AI section. Every SaaS site shoved AI into the hero in 2024. Most regret it. 1Password's brand is trust, and AI right now reads as risk for security buyers. Hold for now.
• Wouldn't add a marketing video. Loom-style autoplaying product video works for products that are demos-of-themselves. Password management isn't visually demonstrable. Stick with the working watchtower panel.
• Wouldn't redo the logo. Brand identity is fine. The work is everything around it.

What this would cost to actually ship

If 1Password engaged Plinth to build this concept:

• Discovery + strategy: $5K, 1 week
• Design (hero, 6 sections, mobile, design system): $12K, 2 weeks
• Build (Next.js + Vercel, animations, CMS for content): $10K, 2 weeks
• Total: ~$27K, 5 weeks end-to-end

That's an Authority-tier project at Plinth pricing. For a $7B company, it's a rounding error against the conversion lift it would produce. A 1% conversion improvement on a marketing site driving even a small fraction of 1Password's funnel probably pays for the project in days.

Why I share concept redesigns

A few reasons:

1. It's how design studios get hired. Brett Williams at Designjoy. Aminul Haque Chowdhury. Olly Sorsby's Nespresso concept that landed major agency work. Concept redesigns of recognizable companies have driven more inbound for design studios in the last five years than almost any other content format.
2. It's the best portfolio piece I can make without a client. Real client work is gated by NDAs and time. Concept work is unconstrained.
3. It teaches me things. Every concept redesign forces me to articulate decisions I usually make on instinct. The act of writing this is half the value.

If you work at 1Password and want to talk about any of this, I'd genuinely love to. Book a call.

If you're at any other company and reading this and thinking "our homepage has the same problems", that's true of most SaaS companies in 2026, and the fixes are mostly the same. The five decisions above (hero, visual, social proof, CTAs, type) are the high-leverage ones.