Design

AeSTATic value: 5 ways to turn your info into imagery

Posted by Adrian Young

People like stats. People like numbers. How many points have you earned? What was your total number of steps walked last week? Was your screentime up or down? Personalised, bite-sized snippets of information are well-suited to the transient nature of email. Rambling walls of text (like this article) are not. But you know what’s even better than straight-up figures? Those figures… in graphical form. A picture is more engaging, more instinctively understandable. That picture might be a bar graph or a pie chart or any other visualisation that meets your need. If you can think it, there’s probably a way to do it. Let’s take the theme of loyalty points. If your customer can see their progress – rather than…

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User experience in email design

Posted by Josh Green

Email is a fantastic graphical way of communicating with others, however so often in email design the primary function of an email is forgotten. Sure, some emails are just to pass on information, but nearly every single other email is about selling. It is currently impossible to complete a purchase with just an email but this is no bad thing, it streamlines the email’s function. The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page. The email exists solely to drive traffic to a web page. This key idea is so often lost in email design – often it is closely tied to reproducing a similar or lesser version of a website instead. I think this is a terrible…

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Markup And Formatting

Posted by Josh Green

Headings Header one Header two Header three Header four Header five Header six Blockquotes Single line blockquote: Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Multi line blockquote with a cite reference: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997 Tables Employee Salary John Saddington $1 Because that’s all Steve Job’ needed for a salary. Tom McFarlin $100K For all the…

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Use concise email design to improve campaign results

Posted by Josh Green

To improve the effectiveness of your emails it is important to not overwhelm users with choice and to not include any content with duplicate links. This concise approach to email design will not only improve the results of your campaigns but also reduce the time it takes to create them. Keep things simple People can easily be paralysed by choice. It’s easy to be quickly overwhelmed with possible options. The process of incrementally introducing information or options has been something the web has done well for decades now. You don’t need to show every colour shoe in your email. Sell some shoes first, get the person to visit your store and only then should concise email design slowly, incrementally offer…

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Cutting edge email design

Posted by Josh Green

I was recently a keynote speaker at a European email summit in Amsterdam and was asked to talk about “Cutting edge email design”. Whilst researching emails for this event it struck me that one man’s junk can be another man’s treasure. The reason I say this is because it depends on your role or skill set as to what you see as cutting edge email design. I have selected three of the emails I used in the presentation to highlight some design techniques but also to show how important it is to know your audience and to design for them, not you. The first email we will look at is a Dogs Trust email designed to look great whether images…

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Email Analysis: Homebase

Posted by Josh Green

Welcome to the second instalment of my email analysis series! For this weeks review, I’ve picked out a Homebase email from my inbox. To view the full email click here. First Impressions My first impressions of this email were very good. I enjoy the Homebase colour scheme, the contrast of the orange and green works well for me. The email has a lot of plain text, rather than text as images and features a variety of different layout elements. I’m also glad to report it is optimised for mobile devices! Layer by Layer Now lets break the email down section-by-section. Header The header follows the usual pattern of having a View in browser link in the top right. It then…

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