Why we removed the hero carousel from every project we touched in 2025, and what replaced it.
Every project that came across our desk in 2025 arrived with a hero carousel. Sometimes it was three slides, sometimes seven. It was always the first thing the stakeholder asked for, and always the first thing we removed.
The carousel is a compromise made by committees. It is the visual language of indecision: nobody can agree on what the most important message is, so the system rotates through all of them. The user, predictably, sees none.
We replaced them with one of three things: a single, deliberate hero with a single message; an editorial intro that earned its scroll; or, more often, nothing at all — the navigation, the work, and a quiet line of context.
The metric we care about is not engagement with the hero. It is whether the visitor scrolls. After we removed the carousels, they did.