Design service / Email

Email Design.

Hand-coded HTML for every inbox.

A 12-module campaign signs off in Figma on a Wednesday. The hero image disappears in Outlook 365 because the background tag fell off in the export. Nobody catches it until the brand director opens it on her own phone.

So render testing comes first, not last.

Shanghai studio / Design + optional ESP integration

A new iPhone on a stack of cream notebooks on a sunlit walnut desk, screen showing an editorial fashion-brand newsletter email. Studio work / Maven

Why it earns the budget

In a crowded
inbox, design opens.

Roughly 376 billion emails get sent every day in 2025. Half of opens happen on mobile, and 75% of subscribers delete a message that does not render on their phone.

Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has made WCAG 2.1 AA legally mandatory for any brand selling to EU consumers, with fines reaching one hundred thousand euros in Germany.

60.66% of marketing emails still contain critical accessibility issues. Most failures trace back to colour contrast, missing alt text and broken heading structure. Email Markup Consortium, 2025.

A person at a sunlit cafe table holding an iPhone, screen showing a beautifully designed newsletter email with a magazine-style hero image.
The lunchtime open

Across roughly 35 engagements over the last two years: first-pass rendering up from 31% to 82%, production cost down 58%, template variants per design hour 8x. No new hires.

31% First-pass render rate Up from a 31% baseline
0% Lower production cost On multi-market programs
0x Template variants per hour Without a single new hire

The work, defined

Every format, one design system.

A two-line transactional receipt and a 14-module editorial newsletter share almost nothing in their craft. We staff each format with people who have done it before, all working off one design system.

An iPhone and an open MacBook side by side, both screens showing the same editorial newsletter email at desktop and mobile crops.
Templates & lifecycle

Coverage

Every send, one design rhythm.

Campaign templates for product launches, sale announcements, seasonal heroes, partnership co-sends and event invites. Lifecycle sets running welcome, cart, browse, post-purchase, replenishment, winback and sunset. Newsletters and long-form editorial that get read, not skimmed. Transactional templates, the most opened email a brand sends and almost never the best designed.

In scope

  • Campaigns
  • Welcome
  • Cart & browse
  • Post-purchase
  • Replenishment
  • Newsletters
  • Editorial
  • Transactional
A 27-inch iMac showing an email design system library, a tidy grid of nine reusable modules in muted brand colours.
Systems & interactive

Coverage

The library behind the program.

Modular components your marketing team can assemble without touching code.

Design systems with header variants, hero blocks, product cards, CTA styles, footers and dark-mode tokens, tested across every component and handed over with documentation. Interactive and kinetic builds covering AMP forms, polls, carousels, accordions, hover states and animated frames, with graceful fallbacks for the clients that do not support them.

In scope

  • Modular libraries
  • Header & hero variants
  • Product cards
  • CTA styles
  • Dark-mode tokens
  • AMP forms
  • Kinetic carousels
  • Animated frames

Contact sheet

Selected proofs.

Authored work, never a stock pull.

iPhone on a sandstone slab showing the first email of the Maven beauty welcome series, a soft bottle still life above the wordmark.
Maven Beauty welcome series
iPhone in hand showing a Solano abandoned-cart email, a single coral-red product image and two side-by-side CTA buttons.
Solano FMCG abandoned cart
iPad propped against art books showing a Lirien hospitality newsletter, a serif wordmark and a single architectural courtyard photograph.
Lirien Hospitality newsletter
MacBook showing a Veld SaaS onboarding email with a line-art illustration, a three-step list and a single coral CTA button.
Veld SaaS onboarding
iPhone on folded white cotton showing a Polaris Bio order confirmation, a restrained navy header and a short order summary.
Polaris Bio Pharma transactional
Three iPhones laid flat showing the same Bevra Black Friday email in English, French and Simplified Chinese.
Bevra Beverage, multi-market
A designer at a walnut desk with hands on a MacBook keyboard and a second vertical monitor showing an ESP dashboard with email templates listed.
A MacBook screen split between an HTML email code editor on the left and a live email preview on the right.
50+ ESPs Klaviyo, Braze, Customer.io, HubSpot and the rest

Optional capability

Need it loaded into
your ESP too?
We can handle that.

Optional. Most clients hand the HTML to their own CRM team.

If you do not have one, we integrate templates directly into Klaviyo, Braze, Customer.io, HubSpot, Iterable, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, Sendgrid or any of the fifty-plus ESPs we work with, including platform-specific scripting in Liquid, AMPscript and HubL.

  • Litmus
  • Email on Acid
  • WCAG 2.2 AA
  • NDA in place

Already have a CRM team handling integration? We deliver matched-spec HTML and step back.

Our process

Creative is where
it's won.

AI made the technical side cheap and fast for everyone. Picking the layout actually worth shipping is the part that is still hard, and where we spend most of our hiring budget.

First two steps win it. The rest is execution.

Top-down view of a worktable: a printed render-test grid, an open notebook with brief notes, a metal pen, and three printed mobile-email mockups.
Where it is won

Brief and render spec.

Format list, ESP, target inbox matrix, dark-mode behavior, accessibility level, brand guidelines, regulatory copy by market, fallback strategy. Locked before the first sketch.

A senior email art director leaning over a worktable covered in printed email-layout proofs, marking a single proof with a pencil.
Where it is won

Creative direction.

Senior designers set the grid, the type hierarchy, the module rhythm and the hero treatment the rest of the system earns its way around.

A studio wall pinned with a tidy grid of twenty printed paper email mockup variations of the same newsletter.
The rest is execution

AI exploration.

Eight to twelve directions in parallel. Photoreal mockups in the inbox environments they will actually live in, not on a Figma artboard.

A MacBook screen split between a dark-themed HTML email code editor on the left and a live email preview on the right, an iPhone beside it in dark mode.
The rest is execution

Build and QA.

Hand-coded or MJML-built HTML, Litmus-tested across the full client matrix, accessibility-validated against WCAG 2.2 AA. We do not release until rendering is clean in dark mode on iOS, Gmail web and the new Outlook at minimum.

A row of five iPhones laid flat side by side, each screen showing the same newsletter email in English, French, German, Chinese and Japanese.
The rest is execution

Adaptation at scale.

Market variants, language localization, format extensions. EN to FR or DE expands 15 to 30 percent; ZH, KR, JP contracts. No reflowing every template.

Where it's going

How AI rewrote
email design.

Three real shifts from the last eighteen months. The economics of email design moved sharply, fast.

Filed 2025 / Klaviyo · K:AI Composer
In-ESP Generative agent

The production floor moves into the ESP.

Klaviyo shipped K:AI Composer in 2025, a generative agent built into the email editor. Feed it a brief and a voice guide, it returns complete on-brand templates: subject lines, copy, layout, imagery, CTA. For brands without a design team, the production floor now lives inside the ESP.

Filed 2025 / Email Love · Figma AI Studio
~50% Shorter production

Figma to MJML in one click.

Email Love launched its AI Studio plugin for Figma in late 2025, syncing a brand's existing design system with an AI that generates complete responsive templates from a text brief, then exports production-ready MJML to Salesforce, Braze, Iterable, Klaviyo or HubSpot. Teams using it have reported cutting production time by roughly half.

Filed 2025 / Email Markup Consortium
60.66% Still critical-fail

Accessibility moves, slowly.

The Email Markup Consortium's 2025 Accessibility Report found emails with critical accessibility issues dropped from 66.68% in 2024 to 60.66% in 2025, mostly because frameworks like MJML responded to public benchmarking by improving their generated code defaults. A six-point drop in a year matters, especially in the EU.

About a week for a standard campaign template. Two to three weeks for a full lifecycle set. Three to four for a modular system with documentation. Extensions of an existing system come back inside 48 hours.

A format list, your ESP, the brand guidelines and any regulatory copy by market. Send a target inbox matrix and render-test requirements if you have them. If you do not, we define them with you on the first call. The brief and render spec get locked before the first sketch.

Either. We design single campaign templates and complete lifecycle sets running welcome, cart, browse, post-purchase, replenishment, winback and sunset. For a full flow we map the sequence and the triggers with you, then design every email so the set reads as one program, not eight unrelated sends.

Both, depending on what you need. Most clients bring their own copy and we design around it. When you want words and layout handled together, our writers draft the body copy, headlines and CTAs, then the designers build to it. Copy and design developed side by side always beats copy poured into a finished template.

Yes. The subject line and preview text are the first design decision, not an afterthought, since they decide whether the email gets opened at all. We write and test variants, and we check how the preview text reads next to the subject line in each major inbox.

Yes, and we prefer to. We start from your brand guidelines, type scale and color tokens, and build the email system to extend them rather than invent a parallel look. If you have no email-specific system yet, we create one that stays faithful to the master brand.

That is the core of the work. Every build is Litmus-tested across the full client matrix. We do not release until rendering is clean in dark mode on iOS Mail, Gmail web and the new Outlook at minimum, with fallbacks in place for the clients that strip modern CSS.

Every template is validated against WCAG 2.2 AA: color contrast, real alt text, a logical heading structure and a readable order when styles are stripped. Since the European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025, this is a legal requirement for any brand selling to EU consumers, so we treat it as part of the build, not an extra.

Both. Some clients come for one welcome email. Others come with a campaign across fourteen markets, eleven languages and 200 SKU variants, all due in three weeks. The workflow handles both ends.

Senior email designers from agency backgrounds (Wunderman, Epsilon, Ogilvy One, Razorfish) lead. AI specialists handle production volume. HTML by developers who have shipped at scale. QA by people who actually open the email on every device.

You own the final deliverables. We use commercially safe models and document the workflow. Full detail in our Copyright and AI guide .

Yes. One brief, one week, two layout directions and a render test report. No retainer, no commitment, the work is yours either way.

Try us

Try it on a real
brief.

Send us an email job. Inside one week: two layout directions and a render test report. No retainer, no commitment. Yours to keep, even if you walk.