Gallery: Invitation

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!

Combine bold and simple typography, with a monochromatic color scheme in just the right hue of red mauve, and you have this cracker of an email. Designer Justin Veiga has put a lot of personality into this email for Chef Anahita, while delivering a newsletter that’s sure to stand out (and display nicely) in any inbox. In fact, you could turn off all images and not miss the message (or Chef Anahita’s tasty lunchtime treats).

To avoid being mistaken for a phisher we’d just recommend labeling that Facebook Page link with something other than the URL. But apart from that, this is really an email that ticks all the boxes for a successful design.

We spotted this email for Le Cordon Bleu New Zealand and instantly fell in love with the simplistic nature of the lightweight design. It’s mostly text, aside from the subtle images throughout the body and background that compliment the easy-reading nature of the invitation. A suggestion would be to add alt text for the header image, incase it doesn’t load, but aside from that, a simplistic, effective design.

Editor’s note: This email also represents a gentler time. After New Zealand’s triumph over France during the recent Rugby World Cup, I don’t expect the French will have our neighbours over for dinner any time soon!

I admit it, I’m a sucker for companies that care about feedback. Here at Campaign Monitor, our customer’s opinions matter and I always stop and take notice when I see the same attitude from other companies, it says something about them. It doesn’t hurt when it comes in a nicely designed package either!

The design for City Farmers by the Perth-based crew at Generator is subtle without images, but really holds together which is the important thing. I would have preferred that the click here link be text, though, so that nothing is lost in those image off situations.

One thing that isn’t visible in the gallery view is the clever use of personalization. It isn’t just the typical use of a name (though that’s there), but they’re also reminding them of the specific store they shopped at and on what day. It reminds the subscribers and will help to get the best feedback possible.

How about this fun email campaign to get the clicks coming in! It’s very simple in it’s design and somewhat heavy on the graphics, but it packs a punch.

This eye-catching design was created in-house by the South Australian Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Parks SA team. It does a great job of generating excitement in their ‘Art of Nature’ competition, even with images turned off in email clients. That said, we’d recommend featuring more text links to make it easier to click through in this scenario.

Finally, the footer image is using an image map to link through to the respective sponsors. Image maps aren’t really recommended and splitting the images and linking individually may have been a better way to go.

All round, this is a wonderfully creative email design that goes to show that public-sector campaigns can well and truly break the stodgy stereotype. Stay green!

Here’s an email newsletter that’s on the wider end of the scale - with a width of 750px, it will require some pinching and zooming to view the content on a mobile device. However, there are some real nice touches within this design from SAE Creative. One notable feature is the text for the header line just before each content block. At first, I presumed these headers were images, but was pleasantly surprised to see the text show when images are disabled.

Overall this is a modern, bold template featuring nice use of negative space and neutral colours, making it a breeze to read.

This invitation to curious’ launch party looks most inviting indeed. With its soft and friendly color scheme, and semi-casual typography, this design exemplifies the beauty of simplicity.

As always, we’d advise being careful with using URLs as link text, as this can disrupt the harmony by triggering nasty phishing warnings in the email client.

My first thought was Wow, that’s different! This is one of the quirkiest emails I have ever seen. You can’t escape that green, it has surrounded the design and conquered it from every which angle.

The invitation from Apparatjik is for a good cause—helping the planet to breathe. Apparatjik fans are encouraged to plant trees as part of the agreeneryouniverse campaign. Green for trees and cubes to represent an experimental style of music perhaps? One may never be sure. Anyhow, it’s far cry from any conventional newsletter you may find in your inbox and we love it!

This wonderfully elegant and classy e-card created by the guys at C5 Communications for Wardrobe just goes to show that less is more sometimes; there really is no need to include masses of promotional text or reams of photos when your campaign looks this good: a subtle background, wonderfully styled text and a delicate illustration, all encompassed in an embossed frame round this email off nicely and clearly conveys everything you need to know to enjoy the benefits of this great offer.

I suppose my own minor criticism here would be that - despite being designed to be printed out - as this campaign is being delivered by email then a link back to the official Wardrobe site at www.wardroberichmond.com seems like a missed opportunity. A link could have been added to the Wardrobe logo at the top of the campaign, or included in the company contact details at the base.

This is only a minor detail however, so if you’re designing a promotion e-card for your customers, this is certainly the way to do it.

I thought it was time to sprinkle a little unconventional Christmas cheer on the gallery, courtesy of the party-hardy set at Banjo Brisbane and Zeroseven. Now, we’ve seen a few of these text-only email campaigns (in particular, from gallery regulars Cabedge), but to be honest, I can’t get enough of them. As someone who writes loads of copy on a daily basis, I consider this email to be pure, man. There’s no flashy imagery, no quirky layouts, just heavy-set copy. And it works.

This design uses some fairly safe CSS to achieve this justified look. Using a combination of font-size, letter-spacing and table cells to precisely control the flow (instead of text-align: justify;), the text fills the one-column design with almost precarious pixel-perfection - I mean, one px/em off and the whole thing could look wrap-tacular, right? With this in mind, the design takes on a certain edginess - like a solid, cocktail-fuelled client Christmas party, it could all head south to scandal at a moment’s notice (but it doesn’t and that’s what makes it cool).

Now, enough about the meta - what I like above all is how confident the copy in this invitation is. There’s no fooling around regarding Banjo’s mission statement, or even what they do (they’re an Australian ad agency, duh). Either, you love their humor and sign up for a night of nibbles, or you don’t.

My only suggestion would be to link to a contact form to RSVP, but then again, I can forgive this when sending to a small list of invitees, in a scenario where tracking does not particularly matter.

Well done, Banjo and Merry Christmas to all!