Wish your emails looked better? You don’t need to be a designer to have beautifully designed emails – you just need to start improving your emails bit by bit. This blog post is aimed at helping you get started by sharing some very simple and easy to implement design tips.

1. Pick your colours wisely

So you’ve got a logo and maybe a corporate colour or two but how do you decide which colours go with them?

Check out this free online ‘colour picker’ from Adobe’s Kuler it allows you to enter the colours you have in your logo and suggests colour schemes that will complement them.

2. Organise your colours

Now that you have picked a colour palette it is time to decide how you are going to use these colours. Start by playing around with your email and decide what colour each element should be. Once you have a good looking template write down where you are going to use various colours and be consistent. Your list should look something like this:

• Headers: Dark Purple #6F1168
• Background: Light Grey #EFEFEF
• Component background: White: #FFFFFF
• Text: Black #000000
• Links: Orange: #f27123

3. Pick your fonts

In my opinion – 2 is enough! Do you have a special corporate font? Chances are it won’t render correctly in emails so if you really want to use it do your headings in Photoshop or a free image editor and make sure that the ‘alt text’ for the image is the same as the words in the heading.

Then pick one of these ‘web-friendly’ fonts for the rest of your email: Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier, Trebuchet, Verdana, Helvetica, Century Gothic, Impact and Tahoma.

4. Organise your fonts

Fonts are very important for scan ability so make sure you consider how you can use fonts to tell people what is important. Now you don’t want to go crazy and make each line a different size but it is a very useful tool if used consistently as are colour, bold, italics and other font settings. Decide how you are going to use these things! As an example, I suggest:

• bold (and maybe underlined colour) for calls to action,
• italics for quotations,
• colour for headings and
• underlined colour for in-text links.

5. Find balance

A picture tells a thousand words however when designing an email remember there is a chance people will not see your picture unless they read the words and click that magic little ‘display images button’ so you need to include both.

Balance is also about top to bottom and left to right. Look at your email and think about it as a physical object – if you put it on your desk would it fall over?

6. De-clutter

Look at your email and think about what people really need to see upfront? Magazines don’t put everything on the cover and nor should you. Create space between articles and topics. Use landing pages for more detailed content and rather than shrinking that huge image just cut a bit of it out and link it to the whole image.

There is also this great thing called ‘padding’ or ‘paragraph settings’ depending on the software you use, which many people seem to forget about. You can put a bit of space around your text or image or section of the email. It’s really easy, just find the ‘padding’ settings and experiment – you’ll love it.

My next blog post 6 more things you can do to make your email look awesome! Will explore how you can continue to improve your emails. To make sure that you get it sign up to the blog using the ‘subscribe’ box in the top right hand corner.

Posted by:
Kristin Huddleston
Marketing Coordinator

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