Category Archive: Stuff that’s stylish
August design showcase: sampler edition
Welcome back, fellow lovers of style. With summer winding to a close, we’re reflecting on some of our favorite stationery creations of the season. Each of these completely custom Concierge Designs achieves a perfect balance of client concept and designer imagination. Let’s get started, shall we?
Company: Riverbank Arts Centre
Designer: Elizabeth Williams
Located in Ireland, the Riverbank Arts Centre is a venue dedicated to film, theater, music and workshops for children. Riverbank came to Emma with a unique illustration-themed website in place that changes regularly depending on the season. Their goal, however, was to create a stationery that drew in elements of each illustration without creating a season-specific design. Elizabeth pulled several elements from the website, including a watermark-style image of animated characters to echo the audience in the footer. The result is a seamless connection to the Riverbank brand that they can use confidently all year long.
Company: Sagra
Designer: Jennifer Kasdorf
Sagra is one of Austin’s premiere Italian restaurants. Their atmosphere is as important to them as the quality of the food – and that’s saying a lot! The menu is fashioned after the bistro-style meals served in Italian railway stations, and they wanted their email campaigns to match their existing branding. Jennifer based the design on their logo and added a darker texture to give an antique sensibility to the header. Its simple, logo-focused design is flexible enough for a quick message (such as their welcome trigger mailing) or a longer newsletter featuring images of their tasty offerings.
Company: Crystal Jones
Designer: Kelly McClain
Crystal Jones is a talented photographer from Sacramento, California, who described her website as simple, clean and modern with a hint of whimsy. She loves her logo, but she wanted something a little bit playful added to the stationery. Though she couldn’t pinpoint the exact element she wanted, she provided Kelly with links to other websites that accomplish that special something. Kelly chose to add concentric circles for a Méliès-style wave effect, plus some subtle texturing in the header background to add depth.
Company: Agent06
Designer: Jessica Peoples
Angela Barnshaw is the owner and lead listing specialist of Agent 06 in south New Jersey. Having worked with Jessica on stationery in the past, Angela was confident that Jessica was up the task of combining some existing stationery elements with the colors and logo of Keller Williams. The real estate industry is a field that requires a combination of business savvy and hospitality, and that can be challenging to convey. Jessica chose flowers and a scripted font for Angela’s signature. Both elements add warmth, while the Keller Williams and Agent06 names convey the seasoned business experience that’s so important.
It’s been a busy season for our Emma designers, and we look forward to our next opportunity to help you with some stylish stationery.
Until next time … cheers from your entire Emma Design Team.
Meet Cheekwood
How a museum used email and surveys together to make the most of a stunning Dale Chihuly exhibit.
This summer and fall, Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art is the temporary home to spectacular glass sculptures by internationally acclaimed artist Dale Chihuly, and the museum extended its normal hours to allow visitors to experience the exhibit in the evenings. Chihuly’s work is a sight to be seen any time of day, but artistic nighttime lighting transforms Cheekwood’s grounds into a wonderland and transports you — at least mentally — away from the thick, humid Nashville air to an otherworldly place.
While the folks at Cheekwood had planned on offering extended hours on Thursdays and Fridays, overwhelming support for the exhibit made them consider adding another night of Chihuly goodness to the calendar. Rather than just assuming it would be well received, they empowered their email subscribers to make the call.
With Emma’s survey feature, Cheekwood sent a short, stylish campaign (using their stunning Chihuly-themed custom stationery) inviting members, subscribers and volunteers to weigh in on the possibility of making Wednesday evening yet another time to drop by and take in the exhibit. They linked to an equally stylish survey, in which they posed the question, “Do you think Cheekwood should add Wednesday evening to Chihuly Nights?” and then gave survey-takers a chance to include comments to support their answer.
The response was fantastic. The campaign containing the link to the survey was emailed to more than 13,000 audience members, and more than 31% of them opened the email. Nearly 2,000 recipients clicked on the link to take the survey, which overwhelmingly favored adding Wednesday as a new Chihuly Night.
It doesn’t end there, though. The Cheekwood staff created a follow-up campaign to announce the new night and to thank their subscribers for taking the time to give their input. They even shared the survey results (a whopping 94% were in favor of adding Wednesday nights) along with some of the great comments survey-takers offered up in their responses.
This was Cheekwood’s first survey using Emma, and we love the way they kept it simple. They focused their approach on learning the opinions of those closest to the organization, and they thoughtfully followed up with the outcome, letting those email subscribers and Chihuly-enthusiasts be the first to hear the good news.
“Southern Fried Design-a-thon” report
Two Emma designers were on hand to help a non-profit.
How 24 hours and two Emma designers helped reinvent a Nashville non-profit’s brand.
On July 24, both Jimmy Thorn and Elizabeth Williams, superstar Emma designers, stepped away from creating email templates and designs for Emma customers and took on a new design challenge.
The trick? This one came with a 24-hour crunch. They teamed with more than 30 other creatives at CoLab Nashville (and several rounds of 5-hour energy drinks) to create a new logo, marketing strategy, website, video package, brochure and social media presence for the Nashville non-profit YouthTurns, a program through Reconciliation Ministries. It’s a group that does tremendous work to serve and support kids whose parents are in prison.
Why do it?
Jimmy loved the challenge. A fresh project, a blank canvas and a zealous group of creatives collaborating. Some good fried chicken and unlimited drinks didn’t hurt either.
Elizabeth was a bit more skeptical. Social Media Club passed along the information, but with tons of deserving causes, why pick this one? But then she attended a meeting where a young boy walked in and tugged at her heart strings. He described his life with both parents in prison, and how Reconciliation Ministries provided a support structure that encouraged him to refuse the life that his parents had chosen for themselves. Today, he’s a college graduate.
How did it pan out?
The pressure was on. The brainstorming sessions began at 11 a.m. Saturday, when Jimmy and Elizabeth split off with a group of six to focus on the name and brand identity. After a brief fire alarm interruption at 5 a.m. and some Jimmy Hendrix breakthrough tunes, they were still going. They still had to finalize the new look of the website.
The whole Design-a-thon team huddled back Sunday morning. Amidst the yawns and snores were satisfied smiles and a sense of accomplishment. After $80,000 worth of donated support and service, this hometown non-profit had a new identity — YouthTurns — plus a communication strategy and hub for donors, mentors and deserving children to access information and contribute to the cause. They had a new, sophisticated logo and brand design. And a new site that entices donors and supporters to stay connected and keep contributing.
And remarkably, the hodgepodge of designers, coders and marketers established a brand with a plan in 24 hours, pushing their boundaries and stretching their creative limits. And now they can more effectively help improve young peoples’ lives, breaking the cycle of imprisonment. Not bad for one night’s wake.
Want to learn more?
You can find opportunities to donate, volunteer or get involved with YouthTurns online. Take a minute to get to know these guys and the fantastic work they’re doing.
GeekforGood.net, CoLab Nashville and Social Media Club Nashville collaborated to make this event happen, so keep an eye on those groups if you’re in the Nashville area and would like to join in next time.
You can also read more about how Emma gives back to our community and to causes we care about here.
What about you? Do you or your colleagues give back with your creative efforts? What’s been your experience?
Meet the-e-list
How a stylish, in-the-know gal stays connected to her subscribers and the Connecticut shoreline.
About the newsletter.
Every week, Erica Tannen provides her subscribers with news about art, restaurants, services, shopping and more near the Connecticut shoreline. the-e-list is “an excruciatingly opinionated guide” that brings attention to new businesses and trends near the shoreline, and it rounds out Erica’s other unique offerings, including the e-card and PeRKS programs.
Since she conceived the idea for her newsletter in 2009 (“my crazy idea is to develop an online community of like-minded souls on the shoreline”), Erica’s list has grown from just over 1,500 folks to nearly 5,000. Using Emma’s Social Sharing feature, she sees even more growth on the horizon — in this campaign alone, 12 audience members shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email, leading to 83 visits from non-subscribers. Looks like her crazy idea is paying off.
Why we like it.
It’s packed with fresh and timely content. A July sale at a jewelry boutique. A gourmet cookie shop with extreme flavors like Kahlua and key lime. College students that started a mini-catering business. A farm-to-table oyster bar. Survey Tannen’s summer newsletters, and you’ll find these businesses and more enthusiastically profiled.
In short: Know your audience’s interests and create your campaigns with them in mind. Love the things they love, and they’ll be sure to love you back.
It utilizes ad space in a smart way. Erica worked with the Emma designers to create a custom layout with plenty of ad space along the newsletter’s right side. Now, Erica can feature rotating advertisements, and her sponsors reach thousands of inboxes weekly.
In short: Consider offering ad sponsorships in your newsletter. Pick a layout that will highlight ads in a prominent way, and you may just cover the costs of your mailing. Check out our suggestion for selling ads here.
The send-off, at a glance.
- Sent on July 14, 2010, to 4,856 people
- Open rate: 43% :: Click-through rate: 38%
- 12 shares via Social Sharing, 83 trackable visits
- Subject line: All good things in Essex, 7/14/2010
- Created using a custom layout
More details
See the campaign online
See the website
July design showcase: back-to-school edition
It’s been a minute since my school days, but this time of year still makes me want new books and shoes. There’s just something magical – something like New Year’s Eve – about the feeling in the air, like promise and potential are everywhere.
And after all, let’s face it: It’s been a long, hot summer, and maybe a little back-to-school spirit is all we need to get us through the tail end of this heat wave. Who else is ready for some stylish fall boots, back-to-school sales and university stationery? This month’s design showcase will at least help on the university stationery front.
Client: University of Notre Dame Undergraduate Admissions
Designer: Elizabeth Williams
Colleges are great candidates for Design Suite, our custom design package that includes three stationery designs based on one concept. Since university messages must appeal to a wide variety of audiences (prospective and current students, donors and alumni, faculty and staff, high school guidance counselors, parents and so on), the Suite is the perfect way to have something special for each distinctive group – while, of course, retaining brand consistency.
This design is the first of what will become a Design Suite for the University of Notre Dame. The original request included the school’s brand guidelines, which immediately determined the colors and fonts for the stationery. The shape, however, came from website-prowling on Elizabeth’s part. The curved frame appears frequently on the Notre Dame homepage, so Elizabeth mimicked the shape and added shadows and highlights to enhance it, creating a truly three-dimensional feel.
Client: Metropolitan Community College
Designer: Jimmy Thorn
Our friends at the Metropolitan Community College wanted a fresh look for their stationery, so Jimmy was free to play with design concepts that strayed from the look of the website. Still, he knew it was important to communicate the school’s particular personality and style.
They provided their logo as an EPS file, meaning that Jimmy could blow it up as big as he wanted without losing image quality. And that’s exactly what he did: If you look closely, you can see that the background texture behind the logo is actually an extremely enlarged copy of the logo itself. He added color and shadow to give it a metallic sheen and then reversed out the actual logo to white, making the contrast much more dramatic. Their tagline gets its own focus here, but the red slanted bar continually draws the eye right back to the logo.
Client: Stanford University Press
Designer: Kelly McClain
This was the second stationery design for the Stanford University Press. They needed a new, less traditional design for certain kinds of mailings — they weren’t exactly sure what they wanted for their new design, but they did know they wanted their brand shade of red. With that in mind, Kelly perused the SUP website and found that they typically use a lot of white space to give the red accents more power. She also discovered that they have a terrific online presence, and not just with their own website and Emma campaigns. They’re active users of Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, podcasts and a blog, all of which work together to engage a diverse community of fans and followers.
How brilliant, then, for an established American institution of print publishing to be so active on the web. And how brilliant of Kelly to put a similar ironic twist on their “less traditional” email stationery by making it look like a traditional printed letterhead, complete with typewriter font! She further aged the look by bending the page corners just a bit, scratching up the header type and fading the red bar under the title. The “paper” comes to a clean mid-section, though, so that the header and footer images could easily give way to clean, HTML-based design in the middle. That way, the stationery can stretch vertically to accommodate content of any length.
Client: Michigan State University – International Studies and Programs
Designer: Jimmy Thorn
Stephanie from Michigan State University wanted a fairly simple design but requested a variety of colors to represent her international audience. She provided a photo of flags from the around the world, with a busy street market blurred in the background. Jimmy cropped the image so the focus would be entirely on the flags in all their colorful glory, and he took the accent shade of green from the department’s own website. He also borrowed the idea of rounded corners from their existing branding and used that shape to frame the individual design elements as well as the stationery itself.
Stephanie can use the editable text box just below the header for the date, issue number or any other text that she’d like to change out from time to time. It’s completely separate from the text box(es) that form the layout template, so she can still use any of the existing layouts without losing that upper text box.
Until next time … hugs and autumn leaves from the entire Emma Design Team!
The “why” of customer surveys
Survey know-how series, part two of four:
Explore the value of knowing what’s on the minds of your customers.
We’ve all heard banal business expressions from motivational speakers and management books about customer satisfaction, right? Maybe something like …
- It takes years to win a new customer and seconds to lose one.
- It costs up to five times more to win a new customer than keep an existing one.
- A two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.
- The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
OK, so that last one was from my mom and not a *traditional* motivational speaker. But if you boil it down, these types of phrases are just reminders to make sure that you’re taking care of your most important market: your existing customers.
Sending a customer survey means you don't have to guess what people want.
So, how do we do that?
By asking our customers to tell us about themselves and their experience with us and then – and here’s the kicker – listening to them. You have several options when you think about using a survey tool like Emma’s to connect with your customers.
1. Getting to know your audience helps you market and serve them better than you can by simply guessing. Additionally, just the experience of being invited to share an opinion can be therapeutic for a frustrated customer, or inspiring for one who likes you already. A positive experience like that is just one more touch-point that you now have with that customer.
2. Negative feedback is no fun, but it can be extremely valuable for you if it helps you spot and fix problems before a greater percentage of your audience catches on. Customers who are willing to go out of their way to share a frustration with you (instead of simply taking their money and their word of mouth elsewhere) are invaluable. Reward these folks and encourage your team to be truly thankful for them.
3. Surveying people who either have stopped being a customer, or decided never to be a customer during the sales process, can help you fill holes in your service and boost both sales and retention in the future.
4. Lastly, you may receive positive feedback, which is motivating and encouraging. At Emma, we regularly share positive messages about our team and our service along with customer suggestions, and they each fuel our staffers in different ways.
What now, you ask?
A good place to start is to think about your business strategy and form a survey to help you with that purpose.
If…
If you’re finding engagement is decreasing
Try this:
Ask your customers what type of content and offers they are interested in
And don’t forget…
List a few options – don’t make your subscribers come up with them
If…
If you’re wanting to boost sales and retention
Try this:
Ask your lost sales what you could have offered to snag their business
And don’t forget…
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily should offer it. But it’ll give you a good idea of what types of customers your competitors are getting
If…
If you’re interested in serving your clients better
Try this:
Ask them about themselves and what they’ve liked in the past so that you can continue to improve
And don’t forget…
This also may help you create a picture of your customers, which may surprise you
Happy surveying! One thing to keep in mind in all this, however, is that unless you take great pains to get a representative sample of your clients, take care before you act on results. These types of things have a self-selecting characteristic, in that usually you will hear from the very happy and the unhappy. The reasonably satisfied aren’t always motivated to reach out, so take your results with a few grains of salt, or any condiment of your choosing.
Missed part one? Read about the “how” of designing effective surveys.
Next time, we’ll explore the “when” of surveys, with a post about using this tool for event registration and follow-up.
5 things to know about Studio Design
If you’re an Emma customer, you’ve probably heard about this little thing called Studio Design, which is an entirely different (dare we say, groundbreaking) approach to custom design. But as thrilled as we were to launch it, our customers’ enthusiasm quite simply made us feel like dancing.
And so, with the helpful feedback of our community and fellow staffers (except this guy, who really just did the dancing), we’ve put together a handy-dandy user’s guide to our own little design revolution. Which, of course, is not to be confused with Dance Dance Revolution, even though they do, on occasion, look quite similar.
1. What it is
Studio Design is a new way to get custom stationery that relies more pointedly on *your* art direction. One particularly astute customer noted that requesting Studio Design vs. Concierge Design is a lot like answering a multiple choice quiz vs. a short essay question. With Studio Design, we provide a hefty assortment of styles and motifs, and from there, you choose your own design adventure. Side note: Never fear! At Emma, said adventures never end in shipwreck or scurvy.
Lauren Johnston, one of the Emma designers who created the look of the Studio Design request form. Other reasons she is amazing: She has great taste in jewelry, she is a fantastic DJ for the design team and she is from Texas.
So how does it end, you ask? With beautiful stationery created by one of our fabulous designers, of course! And because of the systematized process, we get a streamlined work flow, and you reap all the benefits: shorter turnaround time, minimized design cost and more direct control over the look of your stationery.
2. Who it’s for
If one or more of the following sounds familiar, then you could be a great candidate for Studio Design:
- You want stylish, professionally designed stationery, but you want to be directly involved in the design-making process.
- Your stationery needs to reflect your brand identity, but you don’t have a lot of your own supporting graphics to use.
- You want a simple header that contains your logo or name, and possibly (but not necessarily) a slogan, background color or texture and/or a couple embellishments to make it look extra special.
- You have good, solid ideas about how your stationery should look, but you could use some help articulating what you want.
- You don’t know exactly what you want, but you know what you don’t want — so choosing from a gallery of original graphics would help you figure it out as you go.
3. Where to get it
If you’re an existing customer, just head on over to the online form.
If you’re interested in joining the Emma community, we’d love to chat and get you started! Just give us a ring at 800-595-4401, email us at hi@myemma.com or fill out a quick form.
How a bill becomes a law. Or, how a Studio Design theme choice becomes a stylish custom stationery.
4. How it works
The first step is to give us your basic brand information: your logo or company name, your slogan and your color preferences. Then choose one of our many style themes, each of which has a thumbnail and description to demonstrate what it is.
The menu of textures and elements that you see is based on your choice of theme. This time, though, the thumbnails are in black and white so that you can imagine them in *your* colors. Just keep in mind that the texture is a sort of backdrop, whereas the elements are smaller decorative motifs that work with and enhance your logo.
Finally, you just need to choose the shape of your header and whether you want a drop shadow. Your designer then takes all the information you provided and creates something new, custom, brand-consistent and quite possibly dance-worthy.
5. When it’ll be done
The turnaround time for a Studio Design stationery is two business days from the date we get your request. Keep in mind, of course, that the form does not generate a preview of your stationery. That’s because each header is handcrafted by a real designer, who uses his or her graphic design skill after you submit the request to make judgment calls on things like scale, composition, opacity and angle.
So what if you chose the most perfect shade of green, only to realize that it wasn’t so great after all? Rest assured that you can ask your designer for a revision if you change your mind about any single aspect of your stationery.
Of course, we’re still offering Concierge Design too, so you still have plenty of options. To see some real-life examples of Studio Design, check out our June design showcase. Ready to request one now? Click here for the form, and vive la révolution!
June design showcase: Studio Design edition
It’s an exciting season for the Emma design team as we roll out Studio Design, our shiny new feature that gives customers a more hands-on approach to their custom stationery. In case you’re wondering … if you opt for Concierge Design, that means our designers will create from-scratch email stationery that extends your brand. With Studio Design, you’ll use an interactive form to choose a style, colors, textures and elements for your designer to implement in your custom design. Think of it as choosing the ingredients for a cake that we’ll be baking just for you!
So this month’s showcase is all about this new design option. With these Studio Design examples, you can see the final version of the stationery, as well as the shapes, textures and elements that each client selected from the interactive form. A texture is typically the overall background component that will blend into the entire header image, while an element is more of an accent image. Combined with a logo, they make a stationery header. We thought you might like to see these textures and elements at work, paired with the final header design.
Client: Neuhaus Foot and Ankle
Designer: Taylor Schena
Studio Design style chosen by client: Modern
Our friends at Neuhaus Foot and Ankle wanted to use the colors from their website and implement a structured and professional aesthetic.
After browsing the textures available, they chose a modern texture accented by two modern elements, which Emma designer Jennifer Kasdorf originally created.
Taylor applied Neuhaus’ brand colors to their preferred elements, keeping in mind what we know about the Foveal viewport in email marketing.
The result is a completely custom header that’s consistent with current Neuhaus branding.
Client: Simply Taken
Designer: Jennifer Kasdorf
Studio Design style chosen by client: Fancy
Simply Taken is Staci Pruitt’s photography business, which primarily serves the NATO and military community based in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Her website is squared off and clean, with just a few subtle embellishments. When the time came to create stationery, she wanted the same aesthetic.
She choose sharp corners and a handful of elements from the “Fancy” category, designed by Jessica Peoples (formerly Jessica Saling – congratulations, Jess!).
Jennifer took the time to really familiarize herself with Staci’s product and crafted a lovely design that successfully mimics the Simply Taken website.
Client: Joy Along the Journey
Designer: Taylor Schena
Studio Design style chosen by client: Floral
You can imagine how important it was for Karen from Joy along the Journey, a hospitality network, to express a sense of welcome in her brand stationery.
She chose floral elements, created by Jessica Peoples, to communicate that openness and also to maintain consistency with the Joy Along the Journey logo.
Taylor found a great shade of blue to use from the network’s website and carefully worked in the floral elements. When Karen ended up changing her mind about her element selection, Taylor, of course, made the revision. As part of the Studio Design process, you chose the components, and your designer is happy to make essential changes until the product is something everyone’s proud of.
Client: Heaven on Earth
Designer: Taylor Schena
Studio Design style chosen by client: Floral
Taylor’s had a busy month, hasn’t she? For this Studio Design, she built a custom header for Heaven on Earth, Rachel Bolden-Kramer’s yoga practice, which strives to foster connections and community through customized plans.
Rachel opted for one floral element and one floral texture, both of which were created by our Denver-based designer, Leigh Bernstein. Taylor saw Rachel’s vision right away and chose to accent the tree graphic, while making the fern image a more subtle part of the background.
The final product is soothing and uplifting: heaven on Earth, indeed!
Cheers,
Your Emma Design Team
A fresh approach to custom design
Emma's new Studio Design gives you stylish options in a hands-on format.
Announcing a faster (and super fun) stationery design option.
As you’re dreaming up new ways to showcase your organization’s style in your email campaigns, we’re proud to unveil Studio Design, a faster, more hands-on way for you to request the custom brand stationery that frames your newsletters, surveys and promotions.
New! Studio Design :: $99
With our latest design offering, you’ll walk step-by-step through an interactive form to design a custom header, selecting from our ever-changing menu of hand-designed textures and elements. You’ll choose from styles such as vintage, retro, elegant, edgy, modern and classic to find a look that suits you.
You’ll have more creative control than ever, with easy options to set your logo, colors, shapes and more before you send your selections to a designer who’ll artfully assemble them into one-of-a-kind brand stationery.
Best of all, your stationery is ready in two working days, about half the time of our current stationery design process.
Fresh summer designs for your seasonal campaigns.
And just in time for your summertime promotions and events, we’re featuring a suite of limited edition summer design elements to help you add a little seasonal — and possibly beachy — fun to your next stationery design.
Take your pick from sea shells, waves, nautical elements, beach balls, palm trees, ice cream, sunglasses and more. Then choose the colors you want and create a summer campaign to share what’s new with your audience.
Go ahead … if you’re a current customer, check out Studio Design today! Otherwise, please take a few seconds to get in touch so we can get to know you and tell you more about it.
We hope this additional design option and quicker turnaround time helps your organization make the most of whatever flavor of custom design you’d like in your email campaigns. (If that flavor happens to be rocky road, would it be weird if we show up sometime next week with a spoon?)
As always, we’re here to answer any questions you may have, so don’t hesitate to send us an email, give us a call at 800.595.4401 or visit our help guide, where you can even chat online with us.
May design showcase: tasty creations
In this month’s showcase, we’re highlighting stationery designs that are especially, shall we say, appetizing. Flavorful? OK, we’ll just say it: These designs are downright delicious. They’re also extremely flexible. (Didn’t see that one coming, now did you?) Our restaurant, catering and food retail clients often need to send out last-minute campaigns for spur-of-the-moment promotions, so their stationery designs must be usable for nearly any kind of campaign. Fortunately, our designers are experts at uniting existing brand standards with the unique attributes of email design. And they also really, really like food. At their desks. Preferably sent via (ahem) priority overnight service. You know, to prevent staleness. Just sayin’.
Client: Deluxe Foods
Designer: Leigh Bernstein
This specialty food retail shop from Seattle, Washington, needed a stationery design informed by its current website branding, which balances the refined look of 19th-century English fine china with a thoroughly non-snobby attitude.
Leigh took the header directly from the website in order to replicate the look exactly, since the fonts used for the logo and navigation bar are not standard, web-safe fonts. For the footer, however, she created a beautiful Nouveau design that is consistent with Deluxe’s existing aesthetic: organic but not overtly floral, dainty but not froufrou. And because image-based borders cannot stretch to accommodate longer campaigns, Leigh designed the footer to just barely creep up the sides of the frame. That way, the swooping lines serve to draw the eye back up to the content without sacrificing the stationery’s flexibility.
Client: Cactus Restaurants 
Designer: Elizabeth Williams
Before we began designing, Marc at Cactus Restaurants sent multiple logos and several other files for Elizabeth‘s reference, including photographs and Lotería cards. And although most of those images did not end up in the stationery itself, they were still important to the initial design process because they helped her understand the design aesthetic at Cactus – whether that be the design of the menus, the website or even the décor on the walls.
The end result highlights their most-used design elements (logo, font-specific slogan and the lithograph-style image of four men) while incorporating new design ideas that take advantage of email’s particular capabilities. Elizabeth completely customized the standard “send to a friend” link in the top right corner, and she built a permanent sidebar with an editable text box, which will collapse and disappear if Marc chooses not to input text.
Client: Jailhouse Brewing
Designer: Jimmy Thorn
The folks at Jailhouse Brewing wanted an edgy design incorporating multiple elements in a rowdy, unstructured way. “I don’t want it to be too clean,” read the design request … and right away, we knew this would be fun. Oh, and did we mention it was for beer?
Jimmy started with the logo, which fortunately was available as an EPS file, meaning that the image quality was perfect and the background was transparent. Jailhouse provided the scratchy gray background texture, so Jimmy digitally “tore” the edges and added just a bit of a drop shadow to the header. From there, he found a few key images to add to the design, including a photograph of the brewery from Jailhouse’s Facebook page that he antiqued and framed with an old-fashioned border. The slogan (and its distinct typeface) are also integral to the identity of the Jailhouse brand, so Jimmy made sure to highlight it in the footer and support it visually with the ball and chain.
Client: The Sweets Truck
Designer: Leigh Bernstein
Anyone who speaks with Molly at the Sweets Truck – be it Sam in sales or Leigh in design – can’t help but note how sweet she is! It’s fitting then, that she runs a mobile bakeshop with to-die-for cupcakes. And even fittinger that her custom stationery express that same charm and friendliness.
And since Molly already had established brand standards for font styles and color, Leigh was able to draw directly from provided elements to begin the basic design. The circular icons are images that Molly uses consistently on the web and on the truck itself, so Leigh knew to spotlight those without putting them in the background of the content area, which would have caused rendering problems in certain email programs. She also used the approved Sweets Truck font for all image-based text in the sidebar, while sticking with a web-safe font for the live type at the bottom. With those little tricks of the trade, Leigh was able to protect and promote Molly’s brand identity and still ensure that all readers will see the *exact* design that she does on her own machine.
Until next time … hugs, brand extension and stomach growls from your entire Emma design team!
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