Thanks for reading! Newsletters Get Looks is about the visual elements of email newsletters, to help you plan layouts that make your content shine. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here.

The Best Header Image?

Soundbite by Ashley Carman, a Bloomberg newsletter, looks great and is a pleasure to read. For a newsletter from a large company, it feels fresh. It’s in the voice of one writer and is personable in style.

• The header image incorporates the newsletter title, author name, and author photo with a unique design. It uses minimal vertical space. (Note: The browser view has a different header because it’s in the full Bloomberg website.)

• Why do I consider it one of the best email header images? Because it’s concise but holds a lot of information. It’s a strong visual entrance into Ashley’s work. Note that the only extra design elements and color are in the author photo.

The body of the newsletter is carefully designed too:

• Headers are in sans serif fonts but body copy is in serif fonts.

• Content breaks are black lines that extend the full width of the newsletter.

• The spacing between paragraphs, and the content breaks, is excellent. It gives the content room to breath. This is achieved by having more space between the end of a paragraph and the content break, than between the content break and the next subheading. This would feel surprising while building a newsletter, but works very well for readers.

• The difference in font sizes between subheadings and body copy helps readers scan the email, and prevents the mix of sans serif and serif fonts from being too busy.

Here’s a sample of the content breaks, subheads and body copy:

Curious about length? The word count for that issue of Soundbite:

• Main article plus a follow-up to it: 904 words

• Supplements: 351 words

• Total: 1,255 words

Similar solutions

Dr. Josie Ahlquist also uses a header image that incorporates multiple elements. In addition to the publication title, author name, and author photo, this includes a description of the newsletter and a graphical icon.

She also provides a short table of contents in bullet points, below the header image and before the first section of content.

In the future I’ll write about other types of headers and wordmarks, because they serve different purposes. Sometimes they start the storytelling of a particular post. Often they provide multiple points of information like the examples from Soundbite and Digital Leadership Download. Sometimes they just show the brand, as mine does.

What do you think about the role of the header image in an email newsletter? What examples work well? Add a comment below or email to me at [email protected].

Jobs

The Free Press careers page recently had an opening for a part-time art director. I love that it acknowledged that planning for visuals takes time and is a process. The posting has come down but it gave names to all the tasks you’re performing and the skills you’re using for your own newsletter:

• Researching art

• Editing photo shoots

• Keeping records of photos, credits and captions

• “Creating custom images (collages, color treatments, light graphic design) for select stories and conceiving thoughtful visual approaches to columns, series and packages”

• “Fluency in the visual styles of other online publications and the media landscape in general”

Plus it mentioned images for social media, and for marketing and publicity materials. It’s a 20-hour per week position.

This part surprised me: “The ideal candidate could be a photographer looking to supplement their income or a freelance photo editor.” Any thoughts on why they were leaning hard into photography, when freelance creative directors and designers also have the skills needed for the job?

Other visuals

I'll occasionally write about visuals in media other than newsletters, because interacting with creativity anywhere helps feed our brains.

A fictional image

An image becomes one of the main characters in Kevin Wilson’s newest book, Now is Not the Time to Panic. It's a unique story about two teenagers who write a phrase and draw art to create a poster. They make hundreds of copies and spread them across the town.

Even in fiction the mechanics of distribution are an important factor that propel the narrative.

“I wanted to describe the feeling of pressing a single piece of paper against a brick wall, that little piece of duct tape trying to adhere to the rough surface, and how important it was for the tape to hold,” Frankie thinks but doesn’t say out loud to her mother.

And part of the story is an allegory about current digital media dynamics. The poster-creation takes place in pre-internet times, but the community’s reaction is an allegory about current digital media dynamics.

Kevin Wilson is speaking in Wallingford, CT on April 24 and you can attend in person or online. I'm sure he'll get questions about whether he or anyone has created an actual visual image of the poster. In the book it's never shown, but it’s very important, which I found fascinating.

Thanks for following along as I build in public! Feel free to send feedback and suggestions. Get in touch at [email protected], or connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Best,

Margie