Newsletters
In September 2021, I was tasked with designing and coding the sign-up pages for our latest two newsletter launches, Inside Saturday and The Guide.
In the past, these pages had always been done ad-hoc by a digital designer. The editor would send over the text, the designer would hard-code it and then deploy the page. Any changes to text, design or content meant that the designer had to go into the code and re-deploy. The editors had no access.
L: sign up page for “Inside Saturday”, after the code changes. R: sign up page for “TechScape”, before. The readers don’t notice any changes on the template.
In order to standardize the design and make the production process of these pages more sustainable:
→ I created a template for sign up pages and made it available to the rest of the design team on github.
→ Decided to use mustache. This meant we could pull the text, images and links from a spreadsheet the editor has access to instead of hard-coding the content.
The editors have access to a spreadsheet and can make changes there. These get pulled onto the code rather than being hardcoded, making the process less painful and more sustainable for everyone involved.
→ Styled the pages using SASS variables meaning that, in the future, a new designer could adjust the colour palette of the whole page by changing one paragraph in the scss file. This would allow for more speed in the production but also less room for new bugs to appear.
By using SASS and changing the variables in lines 15-18, the rest of the page is easily adapted to each newsletter’s design.
Head of newsletters: Toby Moses
Head of Production for Newsletters: Mariana Pereira
Design and code: Ana Pradas