How do emails even work? At which point can things go wrong?
To find out, I initiated a cross-functional collaboration and teamed up with Jade, a copywriter who worked closely with the lifecycle team to investigate why our emails were deviating so far from the guidelines. We jumped on a call with the lifecycle team and mapped out the entire process across stakeholders, teams and tools.
By doing this we learned that email clients are extremely limited, which meant that our visual style guides could not be rendered consistently from one inbox to another.
The constraints I discovered became the starting point for design.
I started by defining and refining typography and color styles to reduce complexity, ensure accessibility, and allow some room for brand expression and variety.
One email module at a time, the component library slowly started to grow, eventually including a select variety of color, layouts, and 2 viewport sizes.
In close collaboration with the creative operations team, we eventually defined a process for composing emails in Figma that was compatible with our organization’s set up.