In Nov 2016, I began work as a temporary Communications Specialist I at Western Washington University (WWU). My main job duty was building the HTML emails for the Office of Admissions communications and marketing team. These included both promotional and transactional emails.

In my current role as the Web and Email Developer for the Office of Admissions, I continue to build, test, and improve the HTML emails.

Before I began, emails were created in Dreamweaver and were not tested for cross email client compatibility. I now build and test emails in Litmus, making extensive use of their partials and snippets before compiling and pasting the code into Slate (WWU’s CRM) and adding any additional conditional logic for different audiences.

Email template for prospective students

For 2021, I decided that our prospect and inquiry student audiences needed a new email template. I wanted to make them more casual with a bold and upbeat feel that would also be reflected in the tone of the content. I brought together the members of my team for an email design workshop.

Leaning more on typography not only let us be on-trend and let us be more flexible because we had very few new photos of campus due to the pandemic, but decreased build time. Line illustrations were sourced from the Noun Project (with a pro license).

Illustrations and the photo grid are maintained in Figma and are easy to drop svgs and photos into and export.

Accessibility and inclusive design are a top priority, so none of these emails rely on cut-up images or have important text in an image. Other accessibility improvements include:

• Meeting WCAG 2.0 AA contrast standards for text (5:1) and link text (3:1 with text)
• A sensible hierarchy for screen readers (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
• Images are given descriptive alt text