The most downloaded thing I have ever put out is my email design handbook.
Not the deliverability guide, not the strategy frameworks, not the data playbook. The design handbook. By a significant margin. It is not even close!
And I think I understand why — because the email industry has spent years telling marketers that design is everything. That your emails should look like they were built by a dedicated creative team. That the beautiful Figma-built, pixel-perfect campaigns you see in email galleries are the standard to aim for.
So everyone is searching for the design answer. The thing that will make their emails perform better. The layout, the colour palette, the template that finally cracks it.
Here is what I want to tell you, having sent millions of emails across more than 40 industries, across D2C, e-commerce, B2B, B2C, charities, membership organisations, and everything in between:
Email performance is not governed by beauty.
Design matters. It matters in specific ways that most people have completely wrong. But it is not the lever most marketers think it is. And focusing on it before you have got the more important layers right is one of the most reliable ways to waste significant time and still wonder why performance is flat.
This blog covers what email design actually is, what it is not, where it sits in the overall hierarchy of what makes email work, and the principles that genuinely move the needle. If you want the full 98-page picture — every framework, every principle, every practical technique — that is what the design masterclass is for.
Where design sits in the email hierarchy of needs
There is an email hierarchy of needs. Most people are spending all their time at the bottom of it.
At the bottom of the pyramid: subject lines, copy, content, and design. These are the things we obsess over. The things we A/B test, argue about in meetings, and spend hours refining.
But before any of those things can make a meaningful difference, three foundational pillars have to be in place: the right data, the right systems, and the right strategy. And beneath even those, one thing must exist first: deliverability.
If your emails are not landing in the inbox, design is completely irrelevant. You could have the most stunning email ever created, and if it is in the spam folder, nobody sees it.
If your list is full of people who never asked to be there, design will not save it.
If the message is wrong for the audience, if the timing is off, if you are pushing a product nobody in that segment needs right now — no amount of visual polish is going to manufacture interest that is not there.
Design is an amplifier. When the strategic foundations are right, great design amplifies the message. When the foundations are wrong, great design amplifies nothing.
I want to be honest about something here: I am not a designer. I studied UX design and I understand deeply the psychology of design, the principles, the frameworks. But sitting down and executing a beautiful visual concept? That is not my strength and I will not pretend otherwise. I work with people who have that skill. What I know is the thinking — and the thinking is what this blog is about.
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Email Design Masterclass — 90 minutes. Everything I know.
From the psychology of the inbox to hierarchy, hooks, and UX layers — this is the complete email design framework I have built across millions of sends and 40+ industries. Live session included. Recording available.
The inspiration gallery trap — and why I don't use them
There are plenty of email gallery sites out there — places where you can browse thousands of emails from brands around the world, sorted by industry, campaign type, design style. They look useful. They feel like research.
My honest opinion: they are one of the most dangerous habits in email marketing.
Here is the problem. When you look at a single email in a gallery, you know almost nothing about the context that email existed in. You do not know:
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Who the audience was or how they got onto the list
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Whether those subscribers were intentional or consequential opt-ins
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Where that subscriber was in their lifecycle with the brand
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What landed in their inbox immediately before and after that email
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What device they viewed it on or whether images loaded at all
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What the sender's reputation was at that time
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What the actual commercial goal of the email was
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Whether it performed
You are looking at a visual artifact with no data attached to it. And the instinct is to look at something visually impressive and conclude that it must be a high-performing email. Those two things have almost nothing to do with each other.
When everyone draws from the same gallery, the inbox becomes repetitive. Subscribers start seeing the same structural patterns, the same visual treatments, the same layout choices — from dozens of different brands. The brain adapts to them faster. Predictive coding kicks in earlier. The email becomes expected before it is opened.
And there is something else. When you copy a design that worked for another brand, you are inheriting all the invisible context that made it work for them — their audience, their relationship with subscribers, their brand associations, their timing. Strip all of that out and replicate just the visual? You are left with a shell.
I do not look at what my competitors are doing. I do not do competitive analysis. I never have. What I do is get so deeply into my audience that the right creative direction becomes obvious from the inside. The inspiration comes from understanding the person you are trying to reach, not from looking at what everyone else has done.
That is where genuinely different email creative comes from. Not from galleries. From audience understanding.
The "it has to be on-brand" problem
I hear this constantly: "It needs to be fully on-brand. The design has to reflect who we are."
And to an extent, yes. Brand consistency matters. Recognisable sender identity matters. Colour palette and typography that feel coherent with the broader brand experience — that is worth having.
But the email does not need to be built in Figma, imported as a single image block, and designed like a print ad to achieve any of those things.
In fact, all-image emails or heavily image-dependent emails create several significant problems:
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Images-off rendering — a large proportion of email clients, particularly in B2B environments, render with images off by default. If your email is predominantly or entirely images, a significant portion of your audience is looking at broken blocks and alt text
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Clipping — Gmail clips emails over a certain file size, cutting off anything below the clip point and preventing tracking pixels from firing. Heavy image emails are the most common cause
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Deliverability signals — all-image emails with no live text are a recognised spam signal. The ratio of image to text matters to inbox providers
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Accessibility — screen readers cannot read text in images. If your email is built as images, it is inaccessible to a portion of your audience
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Load speed — on mobile, on slower connections, image-heavy emails take longer to load, and subscribers make decisions in the first few seconds
You can have a visually considered, clearly branded email without any of these problems. Live text with brand-consistent typography. Strategic use of colour. Background colours and sections that work with or without images. That is the design standard to aim for — not visual spectacle, but functional, branded clarity.
The goal is not to look impressive. The goal is to make the message as easy as possible to absorb.
The three layers of email UX — and why most designs only get one right
Email design sits within the broader framework of UX design. And UX design has three fundamental layers. In email, most brands are only thinking about one of them.
Want the full framework? The Email Design Masterclass covers all three layers in depth.
90 minutes. The complete email design handbook turned into a live, teachable session. Everything from UX principles to hooks, hierarchy, and the one-second test — with the 98-page design handbook included.
How the eye actually moves through an email
Nobody reads an email like a book. This is one of the most important things to understand about email design, and most email layouts are built as though it is not true.
When someone opens an email, their eye does not start at the top left and work methodically through the content. It scans. It hunts. It is looking for anchors — visual points it can land on quickly to assess whether the email is worth more attention.
This scanning behaviour is called hooking and floating. The eye floats across the email looking for somewhere to hook. When it finds a hook — a visual anchor strong enough to stop the scan — it lands there and begins to process.
What makes a strong hook:
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A single dominant visual element — a headline, a hero image, a bold graphic — that is clearly more visually prominent than everything around it
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High contrast — the hook stands out from its background and from surrounding elements
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Relevance to the pre-open promise — the reader opened the email looking for something. The hook should be related to that thing, confirming that they are in the right place
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Clarity — the hook communicates something immediately. It is not ambiguous or decorative.
The pre-open promise is worth explaining here. Before someone opens your email, they have been given a preview: the sender name, the subject line, and the preheader. That preview creates an expectation — an open loop the brain wants to close. When the email opens, the reader is scanning for the thing that closes that loop.
If the visual design does not give the eye an obvious place to land that connects to the promise of the subject line, the scanning behaviour becomes disoriented. The brain cannot find what it was looking for. The email feels effortful. And in an environment where the threshold for giving up is extremely low, effortful quickly becomes abandoned.
Poor hook design is the single most common visual problem I see in email reviews. Emails with too many competing visual elements — multiple images, multiple blocks of equal visual weight, multiple calls to action vying for attention — produce an experience where the eye cannot hook anywhere. Everything looks important. Nothing feels important. The email becomes cognitive noise.
Hierarchy — the design decision that makes everything else work
Visual hierarchy in email is the deliberate sequencing of information so that the most important thing is the most visually prominent, and everything else falls into its appropriate supporting role.
In most emails, the natural hierarchy follows something like:
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Primary value or message — the single most important thing this email needs to communicate
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Supporting context or proof — the detail, evidence, or context that supports the primary message
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Primary action — what you want the reader to do
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Secondary or optional content — additional links, context, or offers that are useful but not critical
Not every email needs all four layers. A simple transactional email might need only the first and third. A thought leadership newsletter might weight heavily toward the first and second with a very light third. The hierarchy is not a rigid template — it is a decision about what matters most and how to make that immediately clear.
The hierarchy test is the most useful diagnostic tool for email design that exists, and it takes about sixty seconds to run.
Show the email to someone uninvolved. One second. Close it. Three questions:
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What was this email about?
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What did you notice first?
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What do you think the brand wants you to do?
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If the answers to those three questions align with what you intended — the hierarchy is working. If they do not, the design is fighting the message rather than serving it.
The most common hierarchy failures:
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Everything is the same visual weight — when headline, subheadline, body, and CTA are all similar in size and prominence, nothing leads the eye and nothing communicates priority
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The CTA is visually buried — buttons that are the same colour as other elements, too small, or positioned where the eye has already scanned past before arriving
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The aesthetic treatment overrides the information hierarchy — a beautiful but complex header image takes up 60% of the email, leaving the actual message fighting for attention in the remaining space
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Multiple primary messages competing equally — trying to say three important things in one email, all given equal visual prominence, means none of them land as important
The core purpose of email design — stated plainly
There is one sentence I come back to every time I am evaluating an email design decision.
The purpose of email design is to make the message easier to see, faster to understand, and safer to act on.
Not prettier and not more impressive and defo not more on-brand in a visual sense.
Easier to see. Faster to understand. Safer to act on.
"Easier to see" means the visual treatment does not create barriers to reading — contrast is sufficient, font sizes are appropriate, the email renders correctly without images.
"Faster to understand" means hierarchy is clear, the hook is immediate, scanning reveals the key message without needing to read every word.
"Safer to act on" means the call to action is obviously a call to action — it looks clickable, it communicates what happens when you click it, it is not surrounded by visual noise that creates doubt.
That is the entire design brief for email. Everything that serves those three things is good design. Everything that does not serve those things — regardless of how beautiful it is — is design that is working against the email's goal.
Design does not manufacture interest. If the message is wrong, if the timing is off, if the audience is misaligned — no visual treatment will fix it. But when the strategy is right, the message is relevant, and the audience is ready — design that works with the laws of the inbox rather than against them amplifies all of that.
That is the shift in thinking that changes how you approach email design.
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This is the overview, but the masterclass is the full picture
Everything in this blog is drawn from the 98-page email design handbook — the most-downloaded resource I have ever created, which tells me exactly how much this subject matters to email marketers and how little it is properly explained.
The handbook covers every principle in depth: all three UX layers, the full hierarchy framework, hooks and anchoring in detail, layout patterns for different email types, the one-second test and other diagnostics, accessibility as a design principle, B2B vs B2C design considerations, and the psychology of design decisions in the inbox environment.
The masterclass takes all of that and turns it into 90 minutes of live, teachable content — so you come out of it not just understanding the principles but knowing exactly how to apply them to your own emails.
It is £19.99. It is 90 minutes. It is live, with a recording available if you cannot make the session. And it is genuinely, honestly everything I know about email design from having sent millions of emails across more than 40 industries.
If you have ever looked at your emails and wondered whether they could be working harder — this is where to start.
Further reading from The Vault: