From a designer’s point of view, emails could be described in their broadest sense as a series of rectangles with content inside of them. Just think of your email template’s wireframe — it’s a series of black and white-filled rectangles, right? When you think of it, nearly everything designed for viewing on a screen follows the laws of the rectangles and color fills, but that’s not necessarily the way it has to be.

A recent design trend that I’ve been intrigued by is the use of textures, uneven edges and off-kilter layers to create a more organic feel to email campaigns.

American Eagle has really been at the cutting edge of this trend. Their campaigns use all three of these techniques, plus handwritten fonts and drop shadows (rather than frames), to make their imagery stand out in the inbox. The innovative use of curled photographs and plaster background textures add even more intrigue to the design. I love the way the background texture blends into the white naturally.

Going one step further, American Eagle’s sister brands are getting in on the fun as well. 77kids utilize a linen-style background rather than a plaster one, along with heavily distressed photo borders and paper clips. It’s a unified look for the master brand and the individual brand, and manages to look home-made yet modern. Read More »

I recently was taking a look at some email registration pages out there when I came across a nice little email registration feature that The Puma Store uses on their site.

In the lower right hand corner of their home page, an email subscription box awaits your email address. Once the address is submitted, a good looking registration page appears in a dialog box for the user to enter more details. After filling out that information, the user is sent back to the home page. The cool thing about Puma’s design is that after signing up for email, the area where the subscription field resided now displays a simple line of text, saying “Thank you for signing up!”

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