Gallery: One column

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.

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.

Whilst this campaign for Statusboard by Supersteil is image heavy, it’s still a pretty effective campaign. The most important detail, being the date and time of an upcoming maintenance period, are still set out in text, so any email clients with the images disabled will still display this important information. I really like the idea of the letter within the envelope, it’s really clever thinking - click on the preview above to see it in all its glory.

A couple of points that I would recommend:

• The text in the footer should really be a lighter colour to have more contrast with the background colour. Which includes the important unsubscribe link!
• The white background colour of the main text area doesn’t quite match the images above and below it. Adding a background colour that is a close match or a background image would have just completed this.

That said, it’s still a great looking and fun template for such an announcement.

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.