Jimmy’s design tips, part one
A few best practices and design ideas for the beginning email marketer, including how to talk to your designer.
Here, the Emma Design Team might *look* fabulous, but our photo is breaking the Sample Stationery. An image this big is bad for your SPAM score, and it's bad design: the photo is so wide that it's forcing the right border to move far out to the right, way past the edge of the header.
Jimmy Thorn is a man of few words, but he’s saved some of them just for you. And though he just moved to Emma’s User Experience team, Jimmy’s work has been an integral part of Emma Design for the last three years. We’ll certainly miss our man JimJam, but we’ll always remember these words of wisdom.
1. Keep your content brief. Your audience’s attention span is much shorter than you think. Pique interest with teaser paragraphs, and link to the full story elsewhere.
2. Don’t use too many fonts in one email. Call attention with different font sizes, not different fonts.
3. Using a lot of crazy, bright colors might sound like a great way to get attention — but in reality, it’s a turn-off for your audience and a big turn-on for SPAM filters.
4. Comic Sans, Papyrus and other non-traditional fonts are suitable for a very narrow range of purposes. Generally speaking, they have no place in the majority of professional marketing materials.
5. Giant images do not tell the story well; they can actually get your emails flagged as SPAM. Live text is a much more efficient way of getting your message across.
Ah, that's much better! Now the image has a prominent spot in the campaign, but it isn't breaking the stationery. The borders are rendering properly, and everything is aligned as it should be.
6. The more information you can give your designer, the better your design will be. Despite our best efforts, we are not mind readers — so it’s a safe bet that we are not going to design exactly what you had in mind.
7. If you say “clean” and “modern,” we will take you at your word — and you will probably get a design with more white space than you actually want.
8. When providing art direction to a designer, descriptive words or tangible ideas will yield better results than “jazz it up” or “make it pop.”
9. Designers are used to hearing the word “no.” Don’t feel like you will hurt our feelings if you do not like the design. Just give us some good, solid direction, and we’ll move on and get it right.
10. Make sure your design reflects your company accurately and conveys its true story. Giant flames, for example, might be great if you own a motorcycle shop — not an investment firm.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Jimmy’s Design Tips, which will offer Jimmy’s famously sage insight for the more advanced email marketer.
Want more now? Take a gander at Kelly’s 5 Tips for Visually Effective Email Campaigns.
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About the Author
Kat Amano
When Kat's not working on our Design team, she's often listening to Led Zeppelin while practicing mixed martial arts. That's when she isn't reading Madame Bovary in French while eating mochi ice cream.
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Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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Can’t wait for part 2! This is such a handy article for people just starting to design their first templates. I also love Jim’s points on how to talk to a designer this can be very nerve racking experience for someone that hasn’t worked with a professional designer before.