Developing Outside Inc.’s Newsletter Design System
Create an newsletter design system for 20+ brands
To develop a company-wide design system for all editorial brand newsletters under the Outside Interactive umbrella to help unify varying brands across a wide range of outdoor and health industries.
Established editorial goals, pain points and needs to determine features
To determine what types content blocks would be needed across varying departments and editorial styles, I meet with department mangers and marketing managers, ran card sorting meetings and interviewed editorial staff to:
Determine newsletter trends, both within the outdoor and health industries as well as across the boarder publishing industry
Discover editorial pain points in past & current newsletter builds
Find commonality between brands, industries and company-wide initiatives
Ideate
After establishing company and editorial goals, pain points and finding commonality, I worked to build out wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes. As I ran rounds of ideations by department heads, marketing managers and editorial staff I was able to narrow in on what layouts and block features would meet the needs and goals of each team and the overall company.
Build out modules and templates
As I began to narrow in and establish potential layouts, I began to build out modules and templates that would help develop the overall unification elements from newsletter to newsletter, and brand to brand. These style tiles included designing a unified brand header style, footer and blocks of content particularly around content intended to promote and advertise the Outside membership, Outside+.
Finalize initial templates and develop next steps for further improvement.
As templates and modules where built, additional rounds of ideation and tweaking occurred to continue to establishing a company-wide style and to help transform base templates to be brand specific and honed into what each editor needed to not only create ease for building newsletters but to ensure the needs and expectations of each brand audiences were meet.
As brands went live with their new layouts audience engagement was tracked and plans to ideate further both for individual brands and across the defined system to continue to maintain and improve engagement levels were defined and implemented on a regular basis.
