Introducing the Two-Tone Template
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. — Clare Boothe Luce, Playwright, Activist, lots of other things
The design team at AWeber tends to agree with that quote and tried to take those words to heart when we were working on this new template. Our goal going into this project was to create a canvas that was simple enough to fill out in a couple minutes, but also allowed enough customization to make it feel like it was truly yours.
We ended up with the Two-tone template.
Our Rationale
Simplicity
As mentioned above, the driving principle here was simplicity. The goal was that it should be simple to read and understand to subscribers. Our solution to that was to create a single column design with a distinct hierarchy starting with a solid-color “hero” section containing a clear call-to-action, followed by a clean, white canvas with plenty of space to breathe for supporting content.
Typography
In many ways, this template is a love letter typography in email. We made the choice to use only web-safe fonts in this template (those are fonts that are available on the vast majority of devices) to force us to design something that would look good to as many people as possible out of the box. Since we’re working with all of the quirks that come with email design (different email clients rendering different ways, etc) we had a number of additional constraints on the types of techniques we could use.
“Constraints are good, they give us focus.” — Joe Cotellese Director of Product Development at AWeber
Since our available toolbox was more limited than in a web design project, we were forced to double down on core principles. We focused on creating a comfortable reading experience by adjusting our letter spacing to 1px, and setting our line heights to 1.6 to create space. We aimed to further optimize readability by setting the body text color to a grey we’re quite fond of (#596975).
Our font sizes (headlines, buttons and body copy) and padding between elements are based on a typographic scale based on multiples of 16px, our base font size to create a consistent flow that could be easily scaled relative to each other depending on screen size.
Mobile Responsiveness
As anyone who is designing in the year 2017 will tell you, if you’re not designing content to be easily readable on mobile devices, you might as well not be designing at all.
Since our template was so simple to begin with, it was super easy to ensure it would fluidly resize. That allowed us to spend our time endlessly tweaking things like the type size and rhythm on mobile devices. The result is a template that maintains the same basic look and feel across devices, while being slightly optimized for readability depending on the device type.
We also purposefully excluded any images from the template other than a space for your company logo to make sure the template loaded quickly and didn’t sap mobile users’ data plans.
Customization & Delight
Once we had created the basic skeleton of the template we turned our focus on introducing ways to give the template personality to help people make it stand out in the inbox, and connect back to their individual brand.
The primary way we are doing that is through color customization of the top “Hero” section. That section sits directly below the logo, so it is a great place to re-enforce your overall brand color scheme and personality. Here was another opportunity to focus on making the most of constraints, so your opportunities for customization here are in the background color, text color, and button colors (need some color scheme inspiration? Check out Coolors.co).
Finally, my absolute favorite part. We created a custom signature element for this email that does something pretty darn neat. On its face it’s pretty straight-forward: a waving hand emoji to communicate “bye!”, and a single signature line. We happen to think that in and of itself is pretty fun and full of personality, but on certain devices it gets even better. In email clients that support css animation (iOS, Android native mail, Outlook for Mac, Apple Mail) the hand will actually wave back and forth.
Let’s see how this could be used:
Some of our fantastic customers in our private Facebook community volunteered their sites for us to use in examples using the template. Check out the variety of use cases and customizations below.
Viral Image Sharer
With Viral Image Sharer we took the simple, compelling messaging around signing up as part of the beta list and dropped it right in the editor.
We also took the opportunity to double the emoji fun by including a cheeky line the VIS folks had on their page in the email footer.
Katlo Designs
In the case of Katlo Designs, we took the opportunity to put together an event invitation email (to a pretty snazzy sounding Weekend Stamping Retreat) using information from the site.
The text rhythm and styling does wonders on longer content like this, making it easy to read whether you are seated in front of a computer or have your nose in your phone (that’s a phrase my daughter uses pretty regularly to call me out when we’re supposed to be spending time together but I’m obsessing over my phone).
Illumine Training
Illumine Training gave us the opportunity to use the template to promote a course. It only took a minute to grab some key course promo content, including an image from YouTube using a helpful thumbnail grabber, and populate the template.
We’re using an email design principle we’ve seen success with (and have verified a number of times through split tests) by including header and footer CTAs to give users who are predisposed to opt in immediately an easy way to do so, and those who need more information an opportunity once they have all the details.
DMR Wedding Entertainment
With DMR Wedding Entertainment we used the AWeber message editor to break out three columns to show off some imagery from that DMR site that highlights of the personality and emotion they deliver.
Be the True You
With Be the True You, we used the template to create an email focused on a download. As opposed to some of the other longer form examples, we Katlo Designs, we opted to include less detail and instead support the event by including a couple quotes for social proof. Of course, since this is a longer email, we ended it with another call to action.
Dani Blanchette
Dani’s site is chock full of beautiful imagery, so we used this as an opportunity to push the limits of this template and see how it would work as a vehicle for showing off images.
This definitely wasn’t the intended use case when we were designing the template, but it actually handles the task pretty admirably.
This one in particular is pretty exciting because it hints at the interesting emails you will be able to create as you come up with new ways to use the simple framework of the template.
The two-tone email template will be available to all AWeber customers on March 6th! Not an AWeber customer? Have 30 days free on us.
