Part of working as a designer at a marketing firm is seeing what other companies are doing to keep their customers happy and coming back for more. One perfect example of this is the clothier Moosejaw from Detroit. I read about their great emails in a blog a while back, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon and subscribe to see what all the hubbub was about. Turns out I look forward to their hilarious content every month and stop everything I’m doing to read it: sounds like a pretty great marketing ploy. Unfortunately, the layout is sometimes bland, and as a designer I want to point out a few things:
1) People tire easily, and this is especially true when reading. It’s been proven that the human eye gets ‘bored’ after about two alphabets-worth of characters – that’s 52 for you non-mathematics. In this Moosejaw example, the first line of copy (below the pretty graphic) has 89 characters. My eye is ready to jump down to the next line half way through but I have to push through to the end!
A great way to handle this lazy-eye syndrome is to simply split your content into two columns (like the, ahem, newspaper does). Your eye will move faster through the copy and it adds a level of authority to your design.
2) Having only copy directly below the banner in every email is certainly a way of dealing with the possibility of no-images rendering, however it’s such a stark contrast from the nice imagery above it. A way to handle this is to simply add a small related image nested in the content (also like in a newspaper or magazine). Of course it won’t show if the customer doesn’t display images, however for everyone else it’ll be a nice resting spot for the eyes and will carry the banner’s message throughout the content.
Having mentioned those two points, I must say that you should all subscribe to Moosejaw’s emails. Even if you’re not the outdoorsy-type, you’ll thoroughly enjoy Bruce the writer’s quips.
