Design Lab

Module 2 — Lesson 8

The Design Lab can be overwhelming at first.

(I mean when was the last time you let your inner Picasso shine?)

In all seriousness, it’s about experimentation.

Envision a general idea of what you want your newsletter to look like
Play around with the editor to create your masterpiece
Keep modifying and iterating as you go

💡 Pro Tip: What newsletters do you consistently open and read? What design do they use? Can you pull inspiration from their newsletter and add what’s uniquely your own to create something new?

How it works

5 Email Design Best Practices

While email design is very specific to your brand — there are a few best practices the top newsletters in the world follow. You don’t need to use all of these tips, these are simply suggestions.

1) Introduce a background color

Most newsletters stick with a white background and black text. There’s nothing wrong with that (it’s the status quo for a reason), but adding a subtle background color is another technique to stand out in the inbox.

Here’s a quick example:

Where do most people go wrong with this? They make the background color too strong.

Can you read that without squinting?

Remember, optimize for readability!

2) Style your content breaks

You know what’s the most boring thing on planet Earth?

A solid straight line.

You know what many newsletters use to break their content up?

That’s right… a solid straight line.

So what can you do instead?

Use beehiiv’s dashed or dotted content breaks instead:

It’s a subtle difference, but it adds flavor to your newsletter that frankly, a solid straight line could never add.

(Sorry solid straight line, it isn’t personal).

Want to get even fancier?

You can create image-based content breaks by adding your image in the content editor and creating a template like the one shown above (but more on this later).

Now, let’s go on.