_{Day 115/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

A couple weeks back I poked at the pixels until the pixels poked back.

And, well, I broke one of the first commandments of “proper” web design:

So, naturally we poke, I center-aligned it.

LAB NOTES • A very small act of rebellion

Test object: Penfriend.ai home page

Change: Hero headline + subhead shifted from text-left to text-center (same font, same copy, no other tweaks)

Duration: 7 days · 11,842 unique visits (split 50/50)

Primary metric: CTA-button click-through to signup

I moved 260 characters 320 pixels and +1.2 pp of marketers suddenly clicked “Start Writing.”

Not exactly a Nobel-worthy breakthrough, but enough to pay for this week’s coffee tab.

Center Aligned My Feelings

The internet keeps yelling “Don’t center copy, it’s harder to read!”
But every SaaS landing in 2025 looks like it just discovered symmetry and a Canva gradient.

What gives?

1. Framer & Webflow templates ship center by default. Laziness scales.

2. Mobile first → narrow screens → “center” feels native.

3. Brand vibe beats eyetracking studies when the product is aspirational (looking at you, Notion).

My hunch:
Left-aligned logic wins in long-form, but heroes aren’t essays.
They’re first dates.
And on first dates people judge vibe before handwriting.

So… should you do it?

• If your headline is one punchy sentence (≤ 12 words), centering can accentuate the punch.

• If your brand skews playful / creative / DTC-adjacent, centering signals “we don’t write TPS reports.”

• Never center a paragraph. That’s just hostage negotiation for retinas.

Rule of thumb I’m stealing from myself:

Tiny to-dos you can steal by Monday

1. A/B test center vs. left on your hero. Give it 5k visits.

2. On mobile, cap line-length to ~28 chars regardless of alignment.

3. Screenshot the winning version and brag on LinkedIn (tag me - I collect validation like Pokémon).

What do you think of the new format? Lemme know.

✌️ Tim "Still aligning my chakras—and my H1s." Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. eel free to waltz over to Penfriend.ai, mash the hero button like you’re playing Whac-A-Mole, and obliterate the clean data I just bragged about.

Whatever you do, please don’t accidentally become a paying customer.
That would be terrible for my revenue graphs. 😉

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.