Email Template Rebuild

Overview

A legacy global template no longer fit the brand or governance needs, and no email or web developer existed to support a rebuild. I designed a new template across four phases — architecture, code review, client workarounds, and emerging challenges.

It uses a semantic T-shirt-sizing padding scale, a named-color preset system, compound color-on-color classes that enforce contrast, a single-boolean dark/light theme toggle, and a layout-direction toggle. Module count dropped from 15+ near-duplicates to ~14 governed by boolean variables, and a multi-pass review caught and resolved 20+ issues.

Impact

• A marketer-governance framework prevents invalid color, spacing, footer, and layout decisions at the template level.
• Full dark/light theming, dual-breakpoint responsive layout, and Outlook/Gmail/Apple Mail compatibility in one governed system — cleared multi-pass review with zero remaining issues.
• The token, naming, and contextual-class systems independently align with established design-system conventions (design tokens, T-shirt sizing, ITCSS/SMACSS).

Categories

Tools