August design showcase: sampler edition

Welcome back, fellow lovers of style. With summer winding to a close, we’re reflecting on some of our favorite stationery creations of the season. Each of these completely custom Concierge Designs achieves a perfect balance of client concept and designer imagination. Let’s get started, shall we?

Client: Riverbank Arts Centre
Emma designer: Elizabeth Williams
Design level: Concierge Design

Located in Ireland, the Riverbank Arts Centre is a venue dedicated to film, theater, music and workshops for children. Riverbank came to Emma with a unique illustration-themed website in place that changes regularly depending on the season. Their goal, however, was to create a stationery that drew in elements of each illustration without creating a season-specific design. Elizabeth pulled several elements from the website, including a watermark-style image of animated characters to echo the audience in the footer. The result is a seamless connection to the Riverbank brand that they can use confidently all year long.

Client: Sagra
Emma designer: Jennifer Kasdorf
Design level: Concierge Design

Sagra is one of Austin’s premiere Italian restaurants. Their atmosphere is as important to them as the quality of the food – and that’s saying a lot! The menu is fashioned after the bistro-style meals served in Italian railway stations, and they wanted their email campaigns to match their existing branding. Jennifer based the design on their logo and added a darker texture to give an antique sensibility to the header. Its simple, logo-focused design is flexible enough for a quick message (such as their welcome trigger mailing) or a longer newsletter featuring images of their tasty offerings.

Client: Crystal Jones
Emma designer: Kelly McClain
Design level: Concierge Design

Crystal Jones is a talented photographer from Sacramento, California, who described her website as simple, clean and modern with a hint of whimsy. She loves her logo, but she wanted something a little bit playful added to the stationery. Though she couldn’t pinpoint the exact element she wanted, she provided Kelly with links to other websites that accomplish that special something. Kelly chose to add concentric circles for a Méliès-style wave effect, plus some subtle texturing in the header background to add depth.

Company: Agent06
Emma designer: Jessica Peoples
Design level: Concierge Design

Angela Barnshaw is the owner and lead listing specialist of Agent 06 in south New Jersey. Having worked with Jessica on stationery in the past, Angela was confident that Jessica was up the task of combining some existing stationery elements with the colors and logo of Keller Williams. The real estate industry is a field that requires a combination of business savvy and hospitality, and that can be challenging to convey. Jessica chose flowers and a scripted font for Angela’s signature. Both elements add warmth, while the Keller Williams and Agent06 names convey the seasoned business experience that’s so important.

It’s been a busy season for our Emma designers, and we look forward to our next opportunity to help you with some stylish stationery.

Until next time … cheers from your entire Emma Design Team.

July design showcase: back-to-school edition

It’s been a minute since my school days, but this time of year still makes me want new books and shoes. There’s just something magical – something like New Year’s Eve – about the feeling in the air, like promise and potential are everywhere.

And after all, let’s face it: It’s been a long, hot summer, and maybe a little back-to-school spirit is all we need to get us through the tail end of this heat wave. Who else is ready for some stylish fall boots, back-to-school sales and university stationery? This month’s design showcase will at least help on the university stationery front.

Client: University of Notre Dame
Emma designer: Elizabeth Williams
Design level: Stationery Suite

Colleges are great candidates for Design Suite, our custom design package that includes three stationery designs based on one concept. Since university messages must appeal to a wide variety of audiences (prospective and current students, donors and alumni, faculty and staff, high school guidance counselors, parents and so on), the Suite is the perfect way to have something special for each distinctive group – while, of course, retaining brand consistency.

This design is the first of what will become a Design Suite for the University of Notre Dame. The original request included the school’s brand guidelines, which immediately determined the colors and fonts for the stationery. The shape, however, came from website-prowling on Elizabeth’s part. The curved frame appears frequently on the Notre Dame homepage, so Elizabeth mimicked the shape and added shadows and highlights to enhance it, creating a truly three-dimensional feel.

Client: Metropolitan Community College
Emma designer: Jimmy Thorn
Design level: Concierge Design

Our friends at the Metropolitan Community College wanted a fresh look for their stationery, so Jimmy was free to play with design concepts that strayed from the look of the website. Still, he knew it was important to communicate the school’s particular personality and style.

They provided their logo as an EPS file, meaning that Jimmy could blow it up as big as he wanted without losing image quality. And that’s exactly what he did: If you look closely, you can see that the background texture behind the logo is actually an extremely enlarged copy of the logo itself. He added color and shadow to give it a metallic sheen and then reversed out the actual logo to white, making the contrast much more dramatic. Their tagline gets its own focus here, but the red slanted bar continually draws the eye right back to the logo.

Client: Stanford University Press
Emma designer: Kelly McClain
Design level: Concierge Design

This was the second stationery design for the Stanford University Press. They needed a new, less traditional design for certain kinds of mailings — they weren’t exactly sure what they wanted for their new design, but they did know they wanted their brand shade of red. With that in mind, Kelly perused the SUP website and found that they typically use a lot of white space to give the red accents more power. She also discovered that they have a terrific online presence, and not just with their own website and Emma campaigns. They’re active users of Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, podcasts and a blog, all of which work together to engage a diverse community of fans and followers.

How brilliant, then, for an established American institution of print publishing to be so active on the web. And how brilliant of Kelly to put a similar ironic twist on their “less traditional” email stationery by making it look like a traditional printed letterhead, complete with typewriter font! She further aged the look by bending the page corners just a bit, scratching up the header type and fading the red bar under the title. The “paper” comes to a clean mid-section, though, so that the header and footer images could easily give way to clean, HTML-based design in the middle. That way, the stationery can stretch vertically to accommodate content of any length.

Client: Michigan State University
Emma designer: Jimmy Thorn
Design level: Concierge Design

Stephanie from Michigan State University wanted a fairly simple design but requested a variety of colors to represent her international audience. She provided a photo of flags from the around the world, with a busy street market blurred in the background. Jimmy cropped the image so the focus would be entirely on the flags in all their colorful glory, and he took the accent shade of green from the department’s own website. He also borrowed the idea of rounded corners from their existing branding and used that shape to frame the individual design elements as well as the stationery itself.

Stephanie can use the editable text box just below the header for the date, issue number or any other text that she’d like to change out from time to time. It’s completely separate from the text box(es) that form the layout template, so she can still use any of the existing layouts without losing that upper text box.

Until next time … hugs and autumn leaves from the entire Emma Design Team!

June design showcase: Studio Design edition

It’s an exciting season for the Emma design team as we roll out Studio Design, our shiny new feature that gives customers a more hands-on approach to their custom stationery. In case you’re wondering … if you opt for Concierge Design, that means our designers will create from-scratch email stationery that extends your brand. With Studio Design, you’ll use an interactive form to choose a style, colors, textures and elements for your designer to implement in your custom design. Think of it as choosing the ingredients for a cake that we’ll be baking just for you!

So this month’s showcase is all about this new design option. With these Studio Design examples, you can see the final version of the stationery, as well as the shapes, textures and elements that each client selected from the interactive form. A texture is typically the overall background component that will blend into the entire header image, while an element is more of an accent image. Combined with a logo, they make a stationery header. We thought you might like to see these textures and elements at work, paired with the final header design.
 

Client: Neuhaus Foot and Ankle
Emma designer:Taylor Schena
Design level: Studio Design
Theme choice: Modern

Our friends at Neuhaus Foot and Ankle wanted to use the colors from their website and implement a structured and professional aesthetic.

After browsing the textures available, they chose a modern texture accented by two modern elements, which Emma designer Jennifer Kasdorf originally created.

Taylor applied Neuhaus’ brand colors to their preferred elements, keeping in mind what we know about the Foveal viewport in email marketing.

The result is a completely custom header that’s consistent with current Neuhaus branding.
 

Client: Simply Taken
Emma designer: Jennifer Kasdorf
Design level: Studio Design
Theme choice: Fancy

Simply Taken is Staci Pruitt’s photography business, which primarily serves the NATO and military community based in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Her website is squared off and clean, with just a few subtle embellishments. When the time came to create stationery, she wanted the same aesthetic.

She choose sharp corners and a handful of elements from the “Fancy” category, designed by Jessica Peoples (formerly Jessica Saling – congratulations, Jess!).

Jennifer took the time to really familiarize herself with Staci’s product and crafted a lovely design that successfully mimics the Simply Taken website.
 

Client:Joy Along the Journey
Emma designer: Taylor Schena
Design level: Studio Design
Theme choice: Floral

You can imagine how important it was for Karen from Joy along the Journey, a hospitality network, to express a sense of welcome in her brand stationery.

She chose floral elements, created by Jessica Peoples, to communicate that openness and also to maintain consistency with the Joy Along the Journey logo.

Taylor found a great shade of blue to use from the network’s website and carefully worked in the floral elements. When Karen ended up changing her mind about her element selection, Taylor, of course, made the revision. As part of the Studio Design process, you chose the components, and your designer is happy to make essential changes until the product is something everyone’s proud of.
 

Client: Heaven on Earth
Emma designer: Taylor Schena
Design level: Studio Design
Theme choice: Floral

Taylor’s had a busy month, hasn’t she? For this Studio Design, she built a custom header for Heaven on Earth, Rachel Bolden-Kramer’s yoga practice, which strives to foster connections and community through customized plans.

Rachel opted for one floral element and one floral texture, both of which were created by our Denver-based designer, Leigh Bernstein. Taylor saw Rachel’s vision right away and chose to accent the tree graphic, while making the fern image a more subtle part of the background.

The final product is soothing and uplifting: heaven on Earth, indeed!

Cheers,
Your Emma Design Team

May design showcase: tasty creations

In this month’s showcase, we’re highlighting stationery designs that are especially, shall we say, appetizing. Flavorful? OK, we’ll just say it: These designs are downright delicious. They’re also extremely flexible. (Didn’t see that one coming, now did you?) Our restaurant, catering and food retail clients often need to send out last-minute campaigns for spur-of-the-moment promotions, so their stationery designs must be usable for nearly any kind of campaign. Fortunately, our designers are experts at uniting existing brand standards with the unique attributes of email design. And they also really, really like food. At their desks. Preferably sent via (ahem) priority overnight service. You know, to prevent staleness. Just sayin’.

Client: Deluxe Foods
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

This specialty food retail shop from Seattle, Washington, needed a stationery design informed by its current website branding, which balances the refined look of 19th-century English fine china with a thoroughly non-snobby attitude.

Leigh took the header directly from the website in order to replicate the look exactly, since the fonts used for the logo and navigation bar are not standard, web-safe fonts. For the footer, however, she created a beautiful Nouveau design that is consistent with Deluxe’s existing aesthetic: organic but not overtly floral, dainty but not froufrou. And because image-based borders cannot stretch to accommodate longer campaigns, Leigh designed the footer to just barely creep up the sides of the frame. That way, the swooping lines serve to draw the eye back up to the content without sacrificing the stationery’s flexibility.

Client: Cactus Restaurants
Emma designer: Elizabeth Williams
Design level: Concierge Design

Before we began designing, Marc at Cactus Restaurants sent multiple logos and several other files for Elizabeth’s reference, including photographs and Lotería cards. And although most of those images did not end up in the stationery itself, they were still important to the initial design process because they helped her understand the design aesthetic at Cactus – whether that be the design of the menus, the website or even the décor on the walls.

The end result highlights their most-used design elements (logo, font-specific slogan and the lithograph-style image of four men) while incorporating new design ideas that take advantage of email’s particular capabilities. Elizabeth completely customized the standard “send to a friend” link in the top right corner, and she built a permanent sidebar with an editable text box, which will collapse and disappear if Marc chooses not to input text.

Client: Jailhouse Brewing
Emma designer: Jimmy Thorn
Design level: Concierge Design

The folks at Jailhouse Brewing wanted an edgy design incorporating multiple elements in a rowdy, unstructured way. “I don’t want it to be too clean,” read the design request … and right away, we knew this would be fun. Oh, and did we mention it was for beer?

Jimmy started with the logo, which fortunately was available as an EPS file, meaning that the image quality was perfect and the background was transparent. Jailhouse provided the scratchy gray background texture, so Jimmy digitally “tore” the edges and added just a bit of a drop shadow to the header. From there, he found a few key images to add to the design, including a photograph of the brewery from Jailhouse’s Facebook page that he antiqued and framed with an old-fashioned border. The slogan (and its distinct typeface) are also integral to the identity of the Jailhouse brand, so Jimmy made sure to highlight it in the footer and support it visually with the ball and chain.

Client: The Sweets Truck
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

Anyone who speaks with Molly at the Sweets Truck – be it Sam in sales or Kelley in design – can’t help but note how sweet she is! It’s fitting then, that she runs a mobile bakeshop with to-die-for cupcakes. And even fittinger that her custom stationery express that same charm and friendliness.

And since Molly already had established brand standards for font styles and color, Leigh was able to draw directly from provided elements to begin the basic design. The circular icons are images that Molly uses consistently on the web and on the truck itself, so Leigh knew to spotlight those without putting them in the background of the content area, which would have caused rendering problems in certain email programs. She also used the approved Sweets Truck font for all image-based text in the sidebar, while sticking with a web-safe font for the live type at the bottom. With those little tricks of the trade, Leigh was able to protect and promote Molly’s brand identity and still ensure that all readers will see the *exact* design that she does on her own machine.

Until next time … hugs, brand extension and stomach growls from your entire Emma design team!

April Design Showcase: Denver Edition

For our next installment of the Design Showcase, it is our distinct privilege to highlight a few cool companies in Denver, Colorado. The Mile-High City is not only the home of the Rocky Mountains, the Broncos and breweries galore, but it’s also home to an Emma satellite office and, more specifically, Emma designer extraordinaire Leigh Bernstein.

Leigh has the opportunity to work with some truly great companies based in Denver, so we’re taking a peek at what sets them apart as stand-out folks and email marketers.
 

Client: The Children’s Museum of Denver
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

The Children’s Museum of Denver is a wonderful non-profit organization that asked Leigh to create something simple, but with distinct touches of their playful branding. For the header, she used bright colors and the signature bee from their website, and she included warm elements such as the ants and grass at the bottom of the design. Thanks to our friends at the museum for letting us play a role in their goal of teaching through play.
 

Client: Kiwi Activewear
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

Kiwi Activewear is a small, spunky company made up of busy moms who see the importance of streamlining one’s life and wardrobe. They depend on online sales and in-person trunk shows, so Sonya Peterson requested a whimsical design that would help them reach out to their customers effectively.

Leigh made the most of a decorative border that allows their campaign content to shine. The border works from one mailing to the next, regardless of the amount of content they wish to highlight.

Why does it work so well? The straight lines at the center allow for expansion. The design delighted Sonya and is a great representation of Kiwi.
 

Client: Impossible
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

Located in the heart of Denver, the folks at Impossible spend their days using live action, design and visual effects to get brands noticed on television.

They love their website and with good reason: They’ve created a sleek aesthetic with their logo, and Leigh’s goal was simply to make it translate easily into the custom stationery.

Leigh accomplished their desired look by employing a blue-to-black gradient, which fades in to a solid color halfway down to maximize flexibility.

The folks at Impossible love the design and have even been known to meet up with our Emma friends in Denver. My, how nice to be neighbors!
 

Client: Colorado AMA
Emma designer: Leigh Bernstein
Design level: Concierge Design

The American Marketing Association is the world’s largest professional society of marketers, so you can imagine how we got excited to work with folks who love the whole of marketing as much as we do.

The Colorado branch of this amazing organization asked Leigh to take creative freedom without straying too far from their website.

She kept the logo prominent and added the eye-catching element of the newspapers to the header graphic. It maintains a simple look while staying close to the branding of the nationwide association.

Until next time … hugs, brand extension and crisp mountain air from your entire Emma design team.

March design showcase: from tacos to traveling

This design showcase launches a new category on the Emma blog – each month, our design crew will present their latest and greatest hits. In this edition, we look at how a slew of businesses are highlighting their brand in their email campaigns through their new Emma stationery. We love seeing how our customers build trust in their brand with custom email design that either mirrors or extends the design of their website and other materials, and these four examples show the value of doing exactly that.

Client: Taco Mamacita
Emma designer: Taylor Schena
Design level: Concierge Design

Our new Nashville neighbor, Taco Mamacita came to us interested in extending their current branding while maintaining a simple aesthetic.

They wanted the content of their campaigns to complement the design of the stationery itself. So Taylor designed vibrant stationery for this local “funky-fusion taco joint” that showcases the company’s memorable logo.

Client:Sweat and the City
Emma designer: Lauren Johnston
Design level: Concierge Design

Sweat and the City, a health and fitness company based in San Diego, has an eye on the future … the future of their website, that is. We like that they support every level of athlete, and their dedication to philanthropy is the cherry on top.

They asked for a scrapbook feel, so Lauren designed with that style in mind.

To maximize deliverability, Lauren steered clear of a background image and used the space above the footer for some rich texture.

Client: Gray Photography
Emma designer: Elizabeth Williams
Design level: Concierge Design

Meet the spunky husband-and-wife team of world-class photographers who call themselves Gray Photography.

This duo lives in Nashville, too, and they inspired us.

Elizabeth knew that they wanted to maintain the edgy feel of their site while adding a more personal touch to the email stationery design.

By incorporating the personable-looking signatures of both of their names as well as texture above the footer, Elizabeth added warmth in a tailored way.

Client: TQ Adventures
Emma designer: Jimmy Thorn
Design level: Concierge Design

TQ Adventures made us want to take a field trip. They take folks on excursions that range from golfing to salt-water fishing and help create memories to last a lifetime.

Naturally, we wanted to provide them with stationery that would tell a story.

Jimmy created a rustic look that conjures the Wild West by yellowing out some images to make them appear antiqued. He also added a subtle wood texture that creates interest without distracting from the focal point: the logo.

Let the journey begin, indeed…

Until next time … hugs and brand extension from your entire Emma design team.