Email Design & Templates
Layouts that hold up in sixty inbox clients: mobile-first structure, dark mode, accessibility, images, and when plain text beats HTML.
Email design is web design with the last twenty years of progress removed. Layouts that work in every major client still rely on tables, inline styles and defensive markup, and the clients that break your design are rarely the ones you test in.
The guides here start with the structural decisions that are expensive to change later — mobile-first, HTML versus plain text, template anatomy — and move on to the ones you can retrofit, like dark mode handling and image optimisation.
Every guide in this topic
- 01 Email Design Best Practices for Higher Engagement The constraints that make email design different from web design, and the eleven rules that follow from them.
- 02 Mobile-First Email Design: Optimizing for 60% of Opens Single-column by default, tap target sizes, and the font sizes iOS silently overrides when you go too small.
- 03 HTML vs Plain Text Emails: When to Use Each What each format costs in deliverability, tracking and effort, and the hybrid most senders should actually use.
- 04 Email Template Anatomy: Structure That Converts The seven zones of a template, what belongs in each, and the one most senders fill with something that should be deleted.
- 05 Dark Mode Email Design: How to Look Good Everywhere How each client inverts your colours, why logos disappear, and the two fixes that work without breaking light mode.
- 06 Email Accessibility: Designing for All Subscribers Semantic structure, contrast minimums, alt text that says something, and what a screen reader does with a table-based layout.
- 07 Email Image Best Practices: Size, Alt Text, and Optimization File sizes that load on mobile data, the images-off default, and the ratio of image to text that trips filters.
- 08 Interactive Email Elements: AMP, CSS, and What Works What is actually supported where, the fallback that has to exist, and whether the effort returns anything measurable.
- 09 Email Footer Design: What to Include and Why The legally required elements, the ones that reduce spam complaints, and why burying the unsubscribe link costs you delivery.
- 10 Brand Consistency in Email: Style Guide Essentials The eight decisions a style guide has to settle so that three people writing email produce one voice.