Extending a design system beyond the site: the email case
We often design a design system for the website, and stop there. But a user doesn’t experience your brand only on the site: they meet it in their emails, their notifications, their receipts. If the identity stops at the site’s edge, the experience fractures at the first email. A half-deployed identity dilutes the work you’ve just done. Extending the system beyond the site is what makes it coherent.
I ran this alongside the Homair redesign.
The channel we forget
The new visual identity also had to express itself in the emails sent by the CRM teams. It’s a channel easy to forget when designing a website, yet one of the most frequent in the customer relationship. I designed the email templates in partnership with those teams, to guarantee continuity between the site experience and the email experience.
Hard constraint: email isn’t the web
Extending a design system into email isn’t copy-pasting the site. HTML email lives with constraints from another age: table-based rendering, uneven CSS support across mail clients, components that must survive Outlook as well as Gmail. The real work is a translation under constraint: keeping the system’s spirit (hierarchy, colours, tone) while re-expressing it in a medium that doesn’t follow the same rules.
It’s exactly the idea that a design system is first a translation. Here we translate from one channel into another, without losing the identity along the way.
A system made for other hands
As with the photo guideline, the real deliverable is templates reused continuously by the CRM teams for their campaigns. Design doesn’t live in a frozen file; it lives in another team’s ability to produce a coherent email without coming back through me. (The detail: Designing the CRM email templates.)
In short
- An identity that stops at the site is half-done. The user meets the brand in their emails too.
- Email is a translation under constraint. Keep the system’s spirit despite HTML email and its limits.
- The deliverable is reusable templates. CRM-team autonomy, not a few one-off emails.
- Coherence plays out cross-channel. A system is only worth it if it holds beyond its home channel.