Blog - Campaign Monitor

Are you a web designer looking for a gig?

We often get approached by people who have enough HTML knowledge to be able to edit an existing page, but don't have the level of design skills to create the look they are after.

We try to be helpful, but we don't always know of a friendly designer who can work with those people to create base designs or MailBuild templates. Last week on the forums, member CleverDick posted a similar query. So if you are a web designer, maybe a freelancer or an inhouse designer looking for some extra gigs, drop by the forum and leave your details in the thread.

When we got more queries like this in the future, we can direct people there to find someone who can help them. We already know you guys are super talented - you can let other people find you too!

Plain text templates to save you time

You spend a lot of time crafting your HTML newsletter, tweaking the layout from a previous edition or adding new sections. Then you get to the text entry field, and have to layout the same content again under much greater constraints.

To give you some ideas about how plain text can be best formatted for readability, we’ve gone looking for some examples of well designed plain text, and then created some simple text templates from them.

Our inspiration (and permission) came from 37Signals, Freshbooks and Good Experience, who all have excellent newsletters that we can personally recommend.

Next time you are faced with that empty text field, just copy and paste a template and fill in the sections. If you already do a great job of text formatting, we’d love to hear about it too. Would it make it easier for you if you always started with the plain text from your last newsletter for that client? Let us know with a comment below.