You should start thinking about design as you’re coming up with your emails. Figure out what kind of visual theme you’ll need based on the messaging. Start looking at assets your organization currently has, like brand guidelines, a copywriting style guide, and any related marketing materials.

Step 1: Set design goals

Along with gathering these assets, set goals for how you want your audience to interact with your emails. For example:

• Design should follow brand guidelines but have a fresh creative direction
• Design should be easy to read and mobile-friendly
• Emails should be accessible by using live text and look good across email clients

This helps you be more strategic about design and determine what constraints to work within for your workflow.

Step 2: Maintain consistency

As you start putting together creatives, keep an eye on the patterns that start to develop. You should lean in to these patterns as a way to develop consistency for your design. It helps make your campaigns recognizable and creates context for your audience.

This is also where you can apply modular design principles:

• Standardize spacing and font sizing
• Define repeatable elements like title text and buttons
• Break up your design into stackable sections
• Use columns for visual flow

This makes reading of your emails easier to digest.

Step 3: Develop a framework

Having a consistent, modularized design to work from, start collecting your elements and document guidelines around how to use them. And make them available for your team to refer to. This is what a design system is all about.

It allows for better collaboration across your email team. With a library of modules and a guide for how they work, your team can develop emails faster, not getting bogged down on details with each new email.

While using these steps towards systemizing your email design and production may seem like you’re limiting the creativity of your emails, that shouldn’t be the case. Your system should allow for evolving: expanding on current rules and creating new ones.

Step 4: Use Blocks Edit to make your system interactive for your team to build and edit emails using a drag and drop editor.