Gallery

This great looking Christmas letter from Ondine Restaurant chef Roy Brett by designers Atalanta is laid out across a 3 column grid in a most elegant manner. The simple and readable type is complemented by tasteful borders and flourishes, and the corn-colored quote really enlivens an otherwise restrained palette.

All up, this is a timeless design that would look just as elegant as a printed letter or flyer, but in many ways has been specifically designed for the inbox.

Here’s a slick email from a creative multimedia collective, called iart interactive ag. Don’t miss out on the animated gif they’ve added - click the thumbnail to view the header image. It’s a great teaser for the matching video on their site, too.

I love it when we get to highlight campaigns in languages other than English, because it shows that you can make an email look really good when using umlauts and other unique characters.

The campaign is a one column layout but looks more like a two column layout because of the side-by-side images in each section. Nice way to break up a lot of text!

Here’s the thing… Orange is not only a gleefully energetic color, but also the name of this beautifully crafted newsletter by creative firm Hambly & Woolley. We particularly like that the header consists mostly of actual text, where others might have resorted to a large image for the header content.

All around, this is a fun little newsletter with a shifting layout, featuring a stark reminder as to what happens when The Thing drinks too much Fanta!

Carbonmade, the awesomest portfolio site, now has their own designer and an illustrator - together, they created this beautiful email campaign. It sure is image-heavy (which we usually discourage), but still features the main message as text. Nonetheless, with a fan club of designers and illustrators, this email isn’t likely to be missed. I’d just recommend moving the ‘View it in your browser’ to the top, since it’s currently hiding below the fold and not of much use there.

They’ve also devised a new strategy to keep a faithful audience, that is, complimenting designers on how good they smell!

Here’s a great example of what can be done if you use an email template as a starting point for your own campaigns. The folks at Postbox transformed our ‘Sample Template’ into this impossibly-clean design; a gorgeous marketing piece that also reinforces their own website branding.

It’s great to see that the same attention to detail that has been put into their app has also been extended to their email updates. All ‘round, a great email to receive in any email client, from a top notch email client at that.

This fresh and friendly design by the multi-talented team at MyFan feels a lot more personal than the typical corporate newsletter. The illustrated arrows and casual font work well and because the campaign is using actual text it still works if the images don’t load.

We also appreciate the clear reminder about the new company name, something that can lead to complaints and confusion if not handled well. Read our blog post for more advice on how to handle name changes too.

Elusive and minimalist can be used to describe this template from ALSOKNOWNAS. Using a simple monochromatic colour palette (primarily shades of grey and black), it sparingly uses color to boldly highlight parts of the newsletter against its concrete-grey background color. The use of crisp monospace fonts gives it an industrial look, which thankfully isn’t difficult to read on both regular monitors and mobile devices.

Overall, this is a really simple and effective template, with attitude that’s as solid as the one-column template itself. You can’t help but wonder about the seemingly-intential typo in the header - but perhaps that’s what they were hoping for.

Part of the reason this stylish, minimalist newsletter from design agency Naughty Fish looks so good is because of the impressive images they’ve added into their campaign. Paired with a deceptively simple layout, this newsletter does a great job at showcasing their amazing work, while not slipping into the territory of being an ‘image heavy’ campaign.

I must admit, I’m also a sucker for typography and the subtle use of colour, and this is another thing Naughty Fish do well here; Georgia is the perfect font for this ‘magazine’ styled design, and I love the way they’ve highlighted their table of contents in the left-hand column using a cool blue, then have highlighted their subscriber links and contact details just below this using a dusky orange.

All-in-all an impressive and pixel perfect campaign which I suspect would look just as good in Outlook 2007 as it would in Apple Mail.

This is one of those emails where the first thing I thought was “I wish I’d designed that.” I’m a big fan of bringing the opening paragraph right up to the top along with the branding. It’s clear who the email is from, but Different Projects displays some humility and immediately delivers what’s important to the recipients.

My favorite part? Look at the fun way the text boxes overlap and interact with the images, all accomplished with clever, email-friendly tables. Lots of white space, clean, consistently branded with their website, all around a fine fine job.