Issue #255 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #255 of All About Email!

Last week we looked at Part Two of my CNIL deep dive, where I asked: “Should we just turn open tracking off?”

This week is my seventh and final guest in our summer series, Annett Forcier, as she explores email brand guides and dark mode. As usual, there’s a sprinkling of my thoughts at the end.

Let’s go! 👇

☀️ You might argue I am bending the rules this week with my final “Summer Series” guest, as meteorological Autumn has begun, but British Summer Time (BST) doesn’t finish until October 25th - go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🤣.

Before we get into Annett’s piece this week, perhaps you are new here or missed the rest of my guests; well, here’s a recap:

Now on to my guest of the summer, take it away, Annett! 🎉

Most brands I meet have a beautiful brand book. Primary and secondary colours, logo do's and don'ts, typography, spacing, tone of voice.

🚨 It's polished, it's precise… and it almost always stops before the inbox.

Because here's the thing nobody warns you about: email is the one place your brand colours don't stay put.

A single hex code that looks perfect on your website gets reinterpreted the moment dark mode enters the picture, and every email client handles that differently.

🫠 Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail each apply their own inversions and colour shifts, so the same navy can land three different ways.

That crisp navy goes muddy. Your black logo vanishes into a dark background.

💡 The "on-brand" button suddenly fails contrast. None of that is a designer being careless. It's the absence of a system.

Most clients arrive with a proper palette: primaries, secondaries, a set of neutrals.

💡 What's missing isn't colours; it's decisions “about” those colours.

Each one still shows up as a single flat hex value, and email doesn't ask "what are your brand colours?" It asks a dozen sharper questions of each one:

✅ A hex code can't answer any of those. A style guide can.

The moment you treat each brand colour as a small set of decisions - light value, dark value, the pairing it's allowed to sit on, the contrast it has to clear - you've stopped guessing and started designing.

You make the call once, write it down, and every future email inherits it.

💡 The gap I keep running into is structural: colour gets judged, if it gets judged at all, inside a single email, never as a reusable ingredient.

A hex looks right in one campaign and ships. The same hex turns up in the “next” email, in a different context, and breaks. 🫠

And context is the whole game, because the same brand hex behaves completely differently depending on what it's applied to and where it renders.

🚨 The problem was never that one email. It was that the colour was never validated as a reusable token: across the elements it sits on and the clients that each treat it differently.

Testing at the design-system level flips that. Instead of asking "does this email look right?" you ask "does this colour behave everywhere it's allowed to go, light mode, dark mode, on every background we pair it with?"

Do that once, and you stop re-litigating the same rendering surprise every campaign.

🧠 Your email style guide becomes the place those answers live, so the next person doesn't have to rediscover them the hard way.

I've said before that dark mode gets treated like an afterthought, and brand colours are exactly where it shows.

Take a yellow button with black text, a strong, high-contrast call to action, right on brand:

Same button, same code, it simply doesn't survive the trip. Nobody made a bad decision here; the decision was simply never made.

🚨 That's the honesty test. Dark mode doesn't invent new problems; it exposes the ones your colours were always going to have.

If your palette carries a documented dark-mode value, a logo that reads on dark, and contrast that survives being inverted, dark mode is a non-event. If it doesn't, it's the day your brand quietly comes apart in inboxes you'll never think to check.

That's really the whole case for an email style guide.

💡 It's not bureaucracy or a nice-to-have PDF. It's the difference between making a decision once, on purpose, and remaking it badly under deadline pressure every single send.

If you want to go deeper on the dark-mode side of this, I got into it on Really Good Emails' Feedback Friday: "Stop treating Dark Mode like an afterthought."

And if building this kind of style guide for your own emails sounds useful, that's exactly the work I do at EmailBoutique; happy to talk it through.

Thanks for having me, Simon. 🙌

Annett

A lot of Annett’s guest post lines up with how I think about email design.

💡 A website brand guide is not necessarily an email brand guide. But I think there is also a broader point here about what brand consistency actually means in email.

Perfect consistency across every inbox is not always possible. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail each have too much influence over the finished result, especially once dark mode enters the picture.

🚨 That does not mean accepting a broken or inaccessible email. It means recognising that consistency and uniformity are not necessarily the same thing.

An email can adapt across different environments and still feel unmistakably like the same brand. The colours may shift, a logo may need an alternative treatment, or a fallback may be less visually ambitious, but the identity should remain intact.

🤔 Perhaps that is what an email style guide really needs to define: not just how the brand should look when everything works perfectly, but how it should adapt when the inbox has other ideas.

I’ve talked about Dark Mode in this newsletter a lot over the years, so this week’s “News & Tips” section below contains lots of useful links about Dark Mode. 🎉

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}},

Simon

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips are all about Dark Mode:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋