Episode 16:
The Intricacies of Email Design with George Pettigrew of InboxArmy

Scott Cohen: Hello, and welcome to That Inbox Army Podcast back for season two. Woo, season two. That just means we ran out of last year. I’m your host, Scott Cohen. With me is the Stockton to my Malone because Utah guy right here.

My co host, Garin Hobbs. Garin, how are you doing today?

Garin Hobbs: It’s a new year, Scott, doing well.

Scott Cohen: Can we still say that when we’re recording in March? That’s all that’s

George Pettigrew: all right.

Garin Hobbs: All right. They don’t know.

Scott Cohen: They don’t know. Well, they do know. Today to launch season two, as I mentioned, we’re keeping it in house for a discussion on email design. In the guest chair today is George Pettigrew, creative director here at Inbox Army. George, welcome to the podcast.

George Pettigrew: Hey, thank you, Scott, Garin Thank you both for having me.

Scott Cohen: Absolutely. We’re excited. But before we get too deep into the weeds, I love to learn about people’s journeys, how they ended up where they are now. So tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up here with us.

George Pettigrew: Okay. You know, I’ve been in design for almost twenty years. My parents were designers, just came up doing design and something I enjoy and love very much. I got into email design, I’ll say, maybe six or seven years ago. I’ve always done email design here and there, but it was always, like, image based.

I didn’t know what email design was. And I got hired at SmileDirectClub. It was my previous employer. I was hired as an entry level production email designer. So I came in at the very bottom, you couldn’t go any lower.

And so I started there, you know, and did that for a while. I would get really frustrated because I would pass off my designs to the development team and the designs would never look like what like how I designed them, spacing, everything would be off. Like I realized I had no idea what I was doing and I didn’t understand the technical side. So that frustration led me down a road or a path to really understand the fundamentals of email design, not just design, but the technical side of it as well. And so COVID hit, we got furloughed.

I was off for two months. I actually learned how to code emails during that two months. Yeah. It just basic table code structure, just code in the email. So I coded my first email, made it responsive, made it pixel perfect, which is something I was told that couldn’t be done.

And so, you know, my mentality changed, my work process changed. And then what really changed, what was the tipping point was 19, my company sent me to Litmus in San Francisco. And I heard Crystal Ladasma, I believe is her last name. Scott, I’ve told you about this before, but she gave a talk on design systems. And it completely I mean, every single pain point I had, she just hit the nail on the head.

And so I was hooked. I spoke with her after she gave that talk and I just that’s been my mentality moving forward. It’s like if you don’t have a design honestly if it does have a design system I won’t even touch it because it is just it’s just so inefficient otherwise. So anyway, that’s, you know, that’s how I got to where I’m at. And what I I’ll I’ll say this real quick.

I know we’re gonna talk about design systems, I’m sure. But what I love about design systems is it really it gives you a very objective way to design for email. You know? So and I’ll elaborate on that later. But yeah.

Scott Cohen: Let’s let’s elaborate right now on that. You know? I mean, I’ve called it for years a master email template. But really what we’ve what I’ve been talking about is an email design system. I mean, I can feel the passion.

Right?

George Pettigrew: I can

Scott Cohen: I mean, we’ve talked about it before before that plenty of times, and but let’s dive a bit deeper for the folks that don’t fully might call it master template or, you know, a lot of people just call an email? Yeah. Let’s just build a template. It’s like, well, hold on. Those are two different things.

What is an email design system and why should all brands have one?

George Pettigrew: Okay. Well, an email does I like to call them modular email design systems. So any any design system should be modular in nature. I’ll I’ll talk about that part or that piece in a second. But essentially, an email design system system or a modular email design system is a set of rules or guidelines that standardize your brand’s like email design.

So it not only standardizes your brand’s email design, but it standardizes like, it keeps your brand consistent across your different marketing channels. So, you know, web, app, social media, you want as much continuity as possible. So design systems help give you that that that standardization and that consistency so that everything looks and feels like it’s on brand. Like, you using the same fonts in those different channels? The same colors?

Right? I’ve I’ve audited a lot of code where I’ll see like 19 hex values for like a light shade of per or gray. And it’s just there’s no consistency. Right? It’s just like they’re almost the same.

They’re virtually the same, but they’re not. So design systems just help, you know, cut out a lot of that stuff and

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. I I like the the stamp you put on it modular design systems. Right? So one of the things I one of the sort of tax that I take to help describe that to people is think of it as a collection of nine different Legos, so to speak. Right.

And, you know, the Legos don’t change. They maintain their standards, but you can rearrange these and reconfigure them in almost limitless different ways that give you greater extensibility of application and use to your point without having to risk brand standards or without having to risk something, delivering a consistent look, feel and customer experience. So I like that you really call that out specifically. It’s one thing to create a static template. It’s another to make it modular and really, again, give it a much longer life cycle and more time on stage.

You know, I’ve really picked up on your passion about design systems since you’ve been here. I think it’s a flag we’ve all kind of grabbed on and started carrying forward as well. I do in my, a lot of my conversations with our own clients and partners here, George, tend to get a little bit of pushback against design systems, right? Some of it’s likely due to their lack of understanding. I won’t use the word ignorance.

But typically the argument I get is you can’t be creative within a design system. Right? What say you to that?

George Pettigrew: Oh, man. This is something I get a lot. To me, it it you know, I would say it’s an excuse. Right? But I think more so and I hate to say that, but I just like being straight and direct.

I think the real issue isn’t the design system itself, but rather how people view creativity. Right? A design system doesn’t restrict creativity. It focuses it. So especially for something like email design, you really in order to design for emails, you have to understand the technical side of it.

There’s no way around it. It’s like designing a website. You can’t be a UI designer or product designer. Any type of, honestly, any type of designer if you don’t understand the fundamentals of what you’re designing for. Right?

If you don’t understand the user experience, if you don’t understand accessibility, if you don’t understand different types of users, right? You have people who use screen readers, you have people who are visually impaired, you have people who prefer dark mode. You have all these different types of users that you can’t control. The only thing that you can control is your design to conform to your users’ expectations.

Garin Hobbs: I really like the angle you’re taking here, George, right? It’s about how they define creativity, right? Creativity doesn’t mean the ability to do everything. It means doing your best within a set and defined structure, right? And you’re still have plenty of flexibility there.

There’s still plenty of freedom, but you don’t have to worry about going over the guardrails because they’re safely in place. Does that make sense?

George Pettigrew: It’s like, you know, the reason why people feel limited by these design systems or by design system is because they don’t fully understand the fundamentals like I just said. Right? They don’t understand the fun the fundamentals of email design. When you don’t have a strong grasp of the basics of the basic fundamentals in email, like layout, typography, accessibility, like I’ve mentioned. The system can feel more like a constraint rather than a tool.

Right? So but once you understand these principles, you realize the system enhances creativity. So it allows you to push boundaries with purpose and not just to push them, just to push them. You actually have a structured way of designing. So I would just say those who think that a design system restricts creativity, you just don’t understand the fundamentals well enough and you don’t understand the importance of consistency, the value, and and the like, the just honestly, the ROI on time saved alone, you know, and especially with the software like Figma where you can build these design systems and have one person easily manage thousands, hundreds of thousands of assets, you know, you it’s just insane.

It’s like, to me, it’s a no brainer. If you don’t get it, you just you don’t have enough experience or you don’t have enough frustration, you know, from your experience.

Scott Cohen: It’s sort of like setting up, it’s like a blank canvas for artwork, right? For painting. It’s gotta stay on the canvas.

Garin Hobbs: Coloring inside the lines.

Scott Cohen: I mean, you know, I think yes, but I’m saying like, if you have a big piece of canvas, you can do whatever you want within the canvas, but email in particular, and let’s dive a bit more. I mean, you talk about the technical pieces here and the technical requirements. You can design anything you want. Email will just go, Yeah, we can’t handle that. And so it’s defeating you will be defeated by not operating within the canvas.

And by the way, every canvas will look a little different, whether it’s a Microsoft canvas or a Gmail canvas or a Yahoo canvas, a dark mode Canvas. We’ll talk more about dark mode in a minute. But I think that’s the I feel like I’m a big what’s the word I’m looking for here metaphor person. And it’s like you’re yelling about the fact that you have to be contained to a Canvas, not about the fact that the canvas is blank.

Garin Hobbs: That’s a great summary. You

George Pettigrew: know, what about the users? Right? That’s another thing too. People always talk about being creative, but what about designing for your users and the user experience? And then two, in addition to that, when I first started in design and art, whenever I had a blank canvas, and this isn’t exactly with what you just said, Scott, but you know, you need some just follow me if you can.

You need some type of grid system to work with that. Right? Otherwise, or at least for me with my experience, if I have a blank screen to design on and I don’t have a grid, I I don’t know what to do. Right? It’s like I get paralysis.

But anyway, I just wanted to add that in too that, you know yeah.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. So what I heard there was design systems don’t in any way limit creativity. What they simply do is mitigate or limit or in most cases, the risk of designing outside of technical requirements and recommended best practices. Is that a fair summary? There’s an aspect here that you mentioned, and I want us to unpack that a little bit more.

You mentioned accessibility, right? This is something that I’ve been working to increase my own awareness of. When I first heard about accessibility, really started learning about it last year. I saw Sarah Gallardo speak at Jean Jennings Innovation Summit. By the way, great show, great learning opportunities.

So definitely take the opportunity to attend.

Scott Cohen: And a callback, she was on the podcast last season. If you haven’t watched the accessibility chat, go check that out.

Garin Hobbs: Great call out. Where I was really stunned was some of the stats she was giving here, right? First off, this is not a nice to have. This is a legal requirement. This is part of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

More stunning, 25 I learned from Sarah of your likely audience suffers from either some type of visual or cognitive disability. And so accessibility is not pure altruism in terms of making this available to everybody, although there certainly should be that in it. But from the more selfish point of view, from like a brand or a marketer themselves, this is about increasing the size of your addressable audience by adhering to these design principles that were specifically tailored to allow anyone and everyone, or at least the maximum number of people possible to read, digest and interact and engage with your email and your content, right? Why is it so important to properly properly address accessibility in email design, George? I mean, maybe I just took a bit of that from you, but outside of that, I mean, let’s let’s chat through some of the reasons why this is so important.

George Pettigrew: You know, they’re endless. They’re just endless. Let me think. One, you don’t know who your users are gonna be. You know?

And, you know, people who even don’t, people who do not have impairments, let’s say visual impairments for instance, sometimes they might have a temporary impairment, right? It’s like you break an ankle or something. You know, you have to walk around on crutches or use a wheelchair for a while. You’re temporarily impaired or whatever you want to call it. But people just, you know, a big part of being a designer is really understanding cognitive science.

That’s a big part of it. But I I can’t say this enough. It’s just about designing for human needs and human behavior. Everybody’s like, oh, we wanna be like Apple. Why do think Apple is Apple?

They make great products, but their products are so great because they focus on the user experience. Right? Cutting out all those friction points. And when your designs aren’t accessible and things of that nature, you have a lot of friction in your designs. Right?

So accessibility, for those who don’t know, like, font has to be above a certain size in order to be accessible. The color of your font has to have enough contrast when the font is on top of the back or whatever background is sitting on top of, it has to have enough contrast so that you can visually see it without straining. You know, another thing too, a lot of people think accessibility is just for people who are disabled or visually impaired or using screen readers. That’s not the case at all. A lot of the times, the reason why those standards are in a play are one reason why those standards are the standards that they are is because they account for situations like where you’re out in public.

Right? You’re on your cell phone. You have something reflecting on your screen. Right? Like, they they account for atmospheric, like, reflections and stuff like that.

Like there needs to be a certain amount of contrast so you can always see your screen even in like difficult viewing conditions. But the main, you know, it it just shows your users that you care. Right? You care more about their experience than you do selling a product or, you know, and of course, you wanna sell your product. I mean, that’s why you’re in business but, you know, I I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bragging but I go to Japan once a year, right?

And one thing that blows my mind about Japan is how accessible Japan is. They have this thing called barrier free entry. So it doesn’t matter where you’re at. It is accessible for mothers, right, for people who are blind. You can be on the countryside of Japan, and you’ll see these yellow, like, grooves on the sidewalks and stuff, and they’re made for blind people.

And it’s just the user experience of Japan always equate the design systems that I create to that or that we create to that. It’s just nothing else exists like. It is top of the line. It is the gold standard. So I mean, when your designs are accessible and stuff, it’s just enchanting to interact with.

It’s easy to interact with. It’s frictionless. I don’t know if I answered your question. I kind of rambled. But

Scott Cohen: No. I did.

Garin Hobbs: I love that correlation. I love that correlation. If you take it a step further, Japan does this, one, it’s the right thing to do. Two, some very smart people somewhere near the top probably realize that the more you enable your society, the more they produce, the more they’re able to live to the fullest, produce to the fullest and give back and create a much more complete and happy society. That’s sort of my takeaway from that.

George Pettigrew: Yeah, it’s so true. So true.

Scott Cohen: Yeah, mean, it’s not because they have to, it’s because, Garin, your point, it’s the right thing to do, but also you increase your access. You talk about you’re in business to sell things, You increase your addressable audience, your accessible audience. They have money. Man. They’ll buy things.

Garin Hobbs: Do you hate money?

Scott Cohen: Yeah, exactly. I like money. People go, is the juice worth the squeeze for that? Yes, absolutely. Now, there seems to be Let’s take accessibility a little bit, and I’m gonna This is a cheeky question for this call.

Image only emails seem to be trying to make a comeback. There are some people out there who are going, ah, just be image only. Who cares? Right? It’s fine.

You can blah, blah, blah, What are your thoughts on image only emails? Who’s that spoke of the bear? I

George Pettigrew: don’t look at image only emails as emails. I never have. So when I get an email and it’s image only, that just tells me whoever designed it has no idea what they’re doing. That’s how I view it. Right?

You it’s not accessible. People with screen readers can’t read it. You know? The alt text, is it it just you know, you bake headlines and CTAs and and prominent information that needs to render no matter what. This is another thing.

I hate image based emails. I just hate them because people think that’s what email is. Right? And I I I strongly advise against that. As a matter of fact, that with our design team, like, whatever you do, do not show the client an image based email.

I do not want to set their expectations that this is what goody this is not the, you know, at least the brand that I wanna help build here at Inbox Army. I don’t want it to be image based. It’s just not email design. People don’t even think about it most of the time. You know, people are gonna view your email from a cell phone, which image based emails are not.

Usually, they’ll take a desktop version and shrink it down on your phone. So that’s it’s not responsive design. It’s just bad design. Right? Because a lot of the fonts are smaller than 14 pixels, which makes it inaccessible.

Yeah. It’s and then, you know, some of the elements are controlled by live type, and then you have dark mode, which it just looks really bad. But the another thing is, like, people are in low network conditions all the time. If we’re at home and connected to our fiber and fast Internet, of course, stuff is gonna render instantly. But most people are out in the wild when they view this stuff.

If it’s not optimized to load instantly, then most people are gonna miss your offer before they even see it. Right? They we people do not have the attention span. It’s a construct in user experience design called feedback. If you click a button, right, if you let’s take skeleton screens for instance.

Do y’all know what skeleton screen well, you don’t have to answer. Skeleton screens, basically, they flash while a page loads. It’s giving you immediate feedback to let you know that something it’s like a low fidelity wireframe. Right? It’s it’s feedback, immediate feedback.

So if you click a button or you see a little loading icon, that’s all feedback. Right? It’s to let you know that your action went through. If it does not if you don’t get that immediate feedback, you’re gonna get frustrated. Right?

That frustration is the number one cause of user abandonment. So what that means is if I get an image based email and I look at it and it’s just a big blank screen, I’m gonna click off of it instantly. I’m not gonna wait thirty seconds for it to load. You know? So it’s just like, I just don’t get it.

I just don’t understand the whole argument with image based versus text based. Again, it’s like you it’s like basketball. You have these basic fundamental rules that you have to follow when you play basketball. Same with email design. Like you can’t just come do what you want and then expect it to be you just it doesn’t work that way, you know.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. Mean, not to mention folks who have their images turned off in their email, right? They miss the entire experience if you’re putting things in email. So it’s

Scott Cohen: more on the B2B side, not as much on the B2C side anymore. Most they’ll default you to images on these days. But yes, to your point, screen readers, all those things, alt text. I think there’s a character limit on how much a screen reader will read on alt text, I believe, if I’m not sure remember from what Sarah said in the previous So you can’t just hide everything. Oh, we put alt text.

It’s fine. Yes. To a point. Yes.

George Pettigrew: Yeah. Well,

Scott Cohen: let’s talk about dark mode. You’ve mentioned it several times. It’s not quite a four letter word yet, or maybe it is. I’m curious what challenges you see in designing for dark.

George Pettigrew: Yes. Yes. So just a few basic rules. In dark mode, usually lighter colors are converted to darker colors and darker colors are converted to lighter colors. So let’s say for instance, if you have an email that’s all black.

Right? Like, the backgrounds are black. In light mode, it’s gonna look fine. But in dark mode, that background is more than likely gonna convert to white. Right?

It’s gonna look completely different. And most people view emails in dark mode. So you you always have to understand those little like how these different email clients or canvases like you referred to them earlier, Scott, how they how these different email engines render your email. They all have different ways of doing it. Some have algorithms.

Some invert colors. For I’ll for Apple, there’s a code snippet you can put for user prefers dark mode, and you can actually so when I I’ve built a couple of websites. And when I build websites, what I do is I’ll take a primary color. Right? And this this is a a process I got from a book called refactoring UI.

It’s from the creators of Tailwind CSS. It’s a UI framework. But anyway, they show you how to take a primary color and expand that color palette and create lighter and darker shades. And what I like about their methodology is they don’t use opacity. Right?

And I’m kinda going off on a tangent, but, Liz, follow me if you can. You can’t use opacity in email because it doesn’t render correctly. You have to use 100% hues. Right? So those color palettes are very important.

So in dark mode, you know, a lot of times people will just drop the opacity and think that’s gonna work. But no, that’s not the case. When you drop the opacity, you have a lot of issues that it will take a entire new podcast to talk about. But what you do or what I like to do is take that primary color, expand it. So I’ll create lighter shades and darker shades of that primary color and in dark mode, I’ll use the lighter end of the spectrum and in light mode, I’ll use the darker end of the spectrum and the reason why is because in dark mode, your background, in theory, should be dark, Right?

So you’re gonna need lighter colors on top of it to have enough contrast. This is kinda it’s really abstract to explain without showing visuals. I wish I had visuals to show, but that’s that’s my take on dark mode. To me well, that’s not my full take. My full take is my mentality is to make sure your email is 100% accessible in light mode.

If it’s 100% accessible in light mode, more than likely it’s gonna be a hundred a % accessible in dark mode. And then you also too have to understand how, like, the technical limitations. Right? Let’s let’s talk about HTML and table code. So let’s talk about websites versus email.

In websites, you can use SVGs. Right? So you can control the color of your SVGs and code on websites. But in email, you can’t. You have to use those SVGs as PNGs.

So PNGs are images, which means images do not have color conversion in email. So if you have iconography, for instance, those colors are not gonna change in dark mode. They’re gonna be the exact same. But any anything that you have in your design that is HTML or that’s controlled by HTML, so your colors, right, your fonts, the backgrounds, color of your fonts, anything controlled by code will change in dark mode. So you you wanna be aware of those technical limitations and stuff like that.

But, again, just make sure your stuff is accessible in light mode. And and for the most part, you should be good in dark mode. Yeah, I guess I’ll stop.

Garin Hobbs: Talking through things like accessibility, dark mode, email design, best practices and principles in general, what are some of the most common mistakes you see designers making in their email designs?

George Pettigrew: I’m sorry, Garin. Can you can you ask that question one more time?

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. Just what are, you know, keeping all of these things in mind, not just dark mode or accessibility, but just basic best practices and principles for email design. What are some of the most common mistakes that you most consistently see designers making in their own email designs?

George Pettigrew: I think my biggest one of the biggest things that I see that annoys the living daylight after me out of me is designers will space things in fractions. So it’d be like 5.33 pixels of padding in between an element. Right? So I always talk about using an eight point stop. So so just a quick backstory.

I’m very passionate about bridging that gap between design and development. And that’s what I love about design systems. It does that. But one element in a design system is called a eight point soft spatial sizing system. And that’s what you use to space things.

So in email design, you you have to have a fundamental under any UI design, you have to have a fundamental understanding of the box model. Right? The box everything adheres to the box model. Anything in a UI design is wrapped around it has a box wrapped around it. Right?

So you have to understand how padding and spacing affects, you know, how you space elements. Like, how much space do you have inside of your button on the left, right, top, bottom, you know. And so an eight point soft spatial sizing system helps designers use basically multiples of eight to space things. And what it does is it prevents designers from just spacing things in fractions. I don’t even know how to space it in fractions.

I’m like, how do you even space it in fractions? But that’s one of the biggest things. The next biggest thing is accessibility. You know, there’s so many times where it’s like text is not accessible. And there are tools that you can use to check the accessibility of your text.

So accessibility, that’s a big one. Touch targets, right? Again, all this stuff is pretty much based off of cognitive science and human behavior, but

Scott Cohen: let’s touch touch What are those?

George Pettigrew: Yeah. It’s basically anything that you click. Right? So you anything you click, and it they’re very important on a phone because you’re using your thumb to click. So it needs to be a certain size.

I wanna say Apple says it needs to be at least 44 by 44 pixels. I think that’s the baseline. It might be 48 by 48. But it has to be a certain size so you can press it without accidentally pressing something else, like a big point. This is something that’s so crazy, and I I’ve seen this a Thumb friendly.

Fat thumb or if you’re, like, dyslexic or whatever, your thumb shake or whatever that’s called. You know, you want that’s why touch targets exist. They account for different fat thumbs or, you know, nerves. But another thing, I’ve I see this, like, the unsubscribe button is right beside another button, and it’s so small. It’s not even a button.

It’s a text link, but it’s so small that you can’t click what you wanna click without accidentally clicking the unsubscribe button. So this stuff needs to be engineered in a way to where you mitigate as much user error as possible. Because, I mean, you might have people unsubscribe. Right? And you might not know why, and it could be something as simple as a touch target size.

So it’s a lot of other things I can go on and on about this, but I’ll stop here and see if you have any.

Garin Hobbs: I love hearing the standards around touch targets. Scott, I’m waiting for the day we have a client that comes to us and say, we can’t understand why our list attrition is so terrible. Is it our offer? Is it our brand? Is it perception of our products?

No, it’s the fact that your unsubscribe link is too damn close to the CTA button, right? That’s the real problem.

Scott Cohen: I’m old enough to actually have done a successful test where we unsubscribe button in the preheader. The unsubscribe link is like, hey, this is great. You don’t want to get this anymore. Do this because that if you make it easy

George Pettigrew: Mhmm. Yes.

Scott Cohen: It’s better than them marking you as spam.

George Pettigrew: People love to hide those unsubscribe links. They’re subscribed to your email for a reason. Like, you do not wanna make it difficult for them to unsubscribe.

Scott Cohen: You get gray, and then it gets to, like, a really light gray on the background. Yeah.

George Pettigrew: Or spared in some paragraph and not hyperlink properly, and you-

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Or the worst is the cold emails where it’s just reply no and I’ll leave you alone. Like, I don’t want you to know I exist.

Garin Hobbs: So no. Exactly. I’m not validating my email address for you.

Scott Cohen: No, not at all. All right. Well, let’s flip it a little bit. What are some of your favorite brands when it comes to great email design?

George Pettigrew: Apple, of course, Grammarly, Zillow. I love Zillows because their emails are 100% accessible all of the time. It’s like and and Crystal leads there. I forgot what she does, but the the Crystal I mentioned earlier leads. She’s like the I’m not gonna say her position because I can’t remember, but her and her team does a great job of making Zillow’s emails just perfect.

I always look at them for inspiration. Airbnb, of course. The one thing I don’t like about Airbnb is they bake their top headline into an image. If you look at their email in dark mode, all of the email is, like, converts except for the logo and the font. It’s like a slice and I’m

Scott Cohen: just Every time.

George Pettigrew: Every single it’s the only thing I’m like, can they change that? But then Google, Etsy, they have good ones and then Udemy. But it’s it’s very few. Very few people do it right. So I don’t have a long list.

It’s a shame. A lot of opportunity.

Garin Hobbs: That’s a great list of folks who were doing it right. Let me flip that on the other side. George, last year I attended a webinar. It was about, you know, best designs in 2024, most innovative designs. And the more minutes I sat in this webinar, the angrier and angrier I became.

Every single example they put up was entirely just shattered. All best practices did not follow, you know, you know, recognized prescription and direction. And, but the excuse I got was, well, you know, sometimes design has to be first and sometimes you have to break the rule to, you know, put forth a really innovative and compelling design. Personally, I felt that was BS, but does it Is it BS? When does it make sense to break the rules and disrupt an email design system or the best practices of email altogether?

George Pettigrew: You know, I feel like if you have a strong understanding of the fundamentals, can have the best of both worlds regardless. To me, there’s never a reason to sacrifice the user experience in the name of creativity. If anything, that shows me and I talk to the my designers or our designers all the time, or the design team that I work with. And one one of the guys asked me a question, he was like, why? Well, know, really good emails says to do it.

They said these are the best emails. I’m like, well, you have to be discerning, right? The majority of what you see on really good emails is not does not follow best practices. The majority of it is image based. So it’s I mean, Garin, I’m with you.

Like, I just don’t understand how you can be an industry leader, quote unquote, but then promote stuff that goes completely against the fundamentals of of of the industry you’re in. But then, you know, it’s you can whenever the client wants you to break the rules, break the rules. Right? You wanna always make the client happy. But a big part what I’ve learned is what’s been missing from a lot of this is education.

A lot of people don’t understand this stuff. They don’t understand these basic fundamentals. They don’t understand accessibility. They don’t understand touch targets. You know, they don’t understand how important it is.

Once you educate them. So every time we get a new client, we’ll build a design system and we’ll we’ll talk about I’ll I’ll go through and I’ll talk about the education behind it. Right? And there’s so much I wanna say and I’m just gonna skip over it. But once they’re educated, a lot of that kind of like subjectivity and stuff, it just kind of goes away.

They’re just completely on board, you know, for the most part. There are some times where you have clients who are just so used to do an image base that they’re like, you know, they have to test it, AB testing and stuff. But I mean, when the client wants you to break the rules, you break the rules. And then if you understand, you really have to understand the fundamentals if you’re gonna break them. Like you really have to understand the rules if you’re gonna break them because then you can break them intentionally, Right?

You’re not just breaking it just to be creative. You’re doing it because you understand what you’re doing.

Garin Hobbs: You you know how far over the line you are and exactly why you’re over the line.

George Pettigrew: Right? Exactly. But you still know, like, a big part of design with me is the way I approach design, and this is any UI design or any type of accessible design is, you know, one of the and I always talk about cognitive science, but one of the I can’t remember the name of the rule, but it’s like how you lead an eye through a design, Right? And I’m going off on a tangent, this is something I wanna say because people don’t really look at it this way. Whenever you look at a design, you wanna look at each element as visually advancing into the foreground or visually receding into the background.

And you know, like your headlines, they should visually advance. Right? You want that to pop and catch the user’s attention. If you have a paragraph right below it, that should visual visually recede. It should still be accessible, but there are ways like you can if you have a white background, you could do I’m giving a very basic example, but you have a black hairline, you have dark gray text for the body copy.

Right? So that’s gonna make that paragraph copy visually recede into the background because that darker gray has less contrast than the black. So you’re using contrast to pop things off the screen and then also you’re using contrast to have things visually recede into the background. You know, if if you understand, like, how to do that stuff and you start breaking the rules, that’s totally fine. It’s how do you wanna lead the eye.

Right? Like, it’s this is design. Right? When I see a creative design, I don’t always consider that create creative. Right?

When I see an email that follows best practices and they cleverly created a solution that’s completely out of the box, I’m like, that is that’s an engineer, right? That’s real designer. It’s just yes.

Garin Hobbs: I’m glad it wasn’t just me, right? And I think that’s why I did get so mad in that webinar is this is a very well known organization whose whole raison d’etre is to showcase some of the best females out there. It’s a lot of folks look up to you. They look at you for thought leadership and you’re literally leading them down the wrong path. Right?

And some of the attitude was more of the, it felt like the artist’s more in love with their art rather than

George Pettigrew: the actual

Garin Hobbs: purpose of the email they were trying Right.

George Pettigrew: They’re designing for themselves and not the user. Right? And then it’s man, it’s just, it left me. It’ll come back. It’ll come back.

But I’m with you, Garin.

Scott Cohen: Well, oftentimes we, you know, that there’s a distinction between selling to a customer directly, B2C customer and then a B2B customer and a B2B audience. What are some key differences you see in design there? Are there any differences in how you would approach email design between those two types of audiences?

George Pettigrew: So to me, it’s like I would still follow the fundamental rules for both regardless. You know, most of my experiences it’s in B2C, but you know, you have user needs, which are B2C, right? You have to, the business has to meet the user needs, right? Or you have to, I saw Venn diagram once had business goals and then it had user needs and in the middle it had the product, right? You’re merging the business goals with the users needs.

But anyway, same with the business, right? Like businesses have needs, They have pain points. They have the same thing. They’re users. They’re just, you know, businesses.

So from my experience, it’s pretty much the same thing. Darren, I know you have a better answer than what I have. But yeah, that’s what I have to say about

Garin Hobbs: No, I think you said it all. I really don’t think there needs to be much difference. I mean, just like in B2C, really comes down to sort of the brand, how they go to market, what’s their ethos and how do they represent that creatively or visually or graphically. In my experience, I feel like in B2C, maybe design takes more of a front seat. Think in the B2B world, you know, to use your terminology, it sort of recedes into the background a little bit.

It’s certainly there, I think, give a bit of brand feel and to provide that experience of sort of brand consistency and brand cohesion. But I tend to see the content coming forward a little bit more specifically things like text, right? So more educational content, really trying to help people, a, understand who this company is, what they do, how it’s different or better, why that matters, and then use from there, use that as a launch pad to kind of help folks sort of build consideration and foster intent. Right? But I don’t see the the b to b strategy for all of email, design included, being very different from B2C.

Oftentimes the timelines are a little bit longer. The customer journey and life cycles are a bit longer simply because the products or services themselves tend to be much more expensive. They tend to be a much higher consideration purchase. And so the front stages of that journey, right? So sort of the welcome, the nurture, etc.

Getting folks to that point of decision tends to be a little bit longer. But outside of that, it shouldn’t be any different. Like you said, George, mean, experience comes first and should be first. I don’t think that changes whether you’re in a B2B or B2C side of the world.

Scott Cohen: I mean, it’s the hierarchy of need, right? So in the hierarchy of content presentation, You have to do more explanation for a bigger purchase regardless of who whether you’re selling to a business or to a customer directly. I mean, I was in the mattress world for a long time. Getting somebody to buy a $4,000 mattress is a lot harder than getting somebody to buy $150 pillow, which is a lot harder than getting somebody to buy a $25 video game, which is a lot harder than getting somebody to buy a $2 candy bar. So, you know, you have to adjust for that.

Now, in B2C, you have the way we’ve set ourselves up as a channel, as an email channel, is we have offers to fall back on. So all people really care about, George, to your point, headline, I don’t

Garin Hobbs: really care about the text. What’s the offer?

George Pettigrew: Yeah. They’re just And

Scott Cohen: and you know what? Scanning, you’ve business to business, you’re still scanning, right? I mean, the number of emails probably all three of us get in a day, we’re like, What do you want? Nope. And we’re out, right?

So it’s fundamentally, it’s no different because it’s still a person at the end of that email. The recipient’s still a person. It’s just that their needs in that particular inbox are going to be personal to their job, not personal necessarily to the rest of their life.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. It’s all the same art. It’s the art of moving people. I mean, that’s really what we do in email, right? Is we exercise and perfect the art of moving people.

George Pettigrew: Yeah. And you know, email is so ephemeral, I believe that’s the word. It’s just so short. You have a very short, like seconds, right? If even.

So yeah, you just have to get it right.

Garin Hobbs: It’s a mosquito’s life cycle, right?

Scott Cohen: That’s a way to do it. Well, I think that we could spend another hour. We could talk. We could dive deep about hierarchy and all sorts of things. But, know, we’re at a good amount of time here.

So let’s just stop here. George, thank you so much for joining. But where can people find out more about you and if they wanna get in touch with you and feel the passion come out about design systems and user experience, how can they get in touch with you if you so desire?

George Pettigrew: Yeah. Well, thank you both for having me. I I really appreciate this opportunity. And if people wanna get in contact with me or find out more, just message me on DM. I love I just love talking about this stuff.

I love accessibility, visual hierarchy, all the things that make up design and good user experience when it comes to UI design. So, yeah, LinkedIn, George Petty Grew. I have a website. It’s called Pettypix.com. It’s dated, but you can message me on there if you want.

But, yeah, that’s those are the only two. I don’t have a blog or anything like that. Just, you know.

Garin Hobbs: I hope that’s Petty Pix, P I T T I, not Pix. Otherwise folks might think you’re into foot images.

George Pettigrew: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Garin Hobbs: You really gotta nail that enunciation.

George Pettigrew: That’s a

Scott Cohen: very good It’s the Nashville accent. He’s gotta really enunciate.

George Pettigrew: Yes, that’s so true. Yep. P E T T I P I X dot.

Scott Cohen: There we go. That’s a big difference. All right. Well, you so much again for joining us, George. And thanks to you, our listeners and watchers for tuning in.

If you’d like to learn more about Inbox Army, check us out inboxarmy.com. Until next time, be safe and be well, everyone.

Garin Hobbs: Cheers all