Building a Newsletter UI Kit

  • Role: Product Designer

    Team: The Washington Post Design System (WPDS)

    Timeframe: Dec 2022 - Dec 2023

  • As the lead product designer, I tackled critical gaps in our workflow: The Post had no standardized newsletter templates or source design files, and email platforms' varying dark mode implementations posed significant rendering challenges. I built a comprehensive UI kit in Figma that established a central source of truth, carefully mapping color tokens to ensure consistent display across email clients' forced dark mode. This system provided designers across product and branding teams with standardized components and templates to create consistent, efficient email designs while accounting for platform-specific limitations.

  • The UI kit streamlined The Post's newsletter design process by providing reusable components that teams quickly adopted. Editorial teams found it easier to create newsletters and make template updates. The system also helped teams test and implement design changes more efficiently. By providing clear specifications to developers, we built a foundation that could grow while maintaining high design standards.

The Challenge

The Washington Post faced several key challenges with their newsletter system:

  • Lack of standardized editorial templates and source design files created significant workflow inefficiencies

  • Inconsistent designs, extended production times, and poor brand cohesion affected newsletter quality

  • Teams worked in isolation, often duplicating efforts by recreating similar components and layouts

  • Email platforms' varying dark mode rules made it difficult to preview template changes before development

Our Goal

I set out to create a UI kit in Figma with these key objectives:

  • Build a single source of truth for all newsletter designs

  • Provide standardized components, foundations and templates with flexibility for different content types

  • Streamline the design process across teams and improve cross-team collaboration

  • Ensure consistent design and branding implementation

My Approach

I conducted a thorough audit of our current design patterns. My approach to creating a newsletter design system involved adapting our main design system (used for web and app) to be more HTML and email platform friendly.

To break down the newsletter modules into components, I first conducted an audit of our existing system. I identified common elements that appeared consistently across newsletters, such as headlines, article previews, and promotional sections. By analyzing how these elements were currently being used, I was able to design flexible components that could serve multiple purposes while maintaining design consistency.

The image shows a detailed cross-template specification audit comparing different newsletter layouts for The Washington Post. The magnified view shows that design specifications were analyzed, highlighting elements like header formatting and spacing measurements.

I built the component system from the ground up, starting with foundational elements like typography, spacing, and colors. Building on this base, I developed larger components including article cards, content sections, and headers. I established clear customization rules that let teams maintain their unique newsletter styles while staying within our design system guidelines.

The canvas component serves as the foundation of my modular newsletter system, featuring customizable slots that designers can populate with various content components. This flexible architecture allows teams to build newsletters by combining pre-built elements while maintaining design consistency. The left layers panel displays the component library I created specifically for newsletters, while the right panel shows these components available for assembly within the template structure.

A key challenge was adapting color tokens for dark mode across different email platforms. Since each email client has unique rules for enforcing dark mode, I used Litmus to systematically map and adapt our colors for consistent display across platforms.

Documentation of WPDS color token translations in forced dark mode scenarios, showing how our design system colors adapt across various email platforms. The mapping includes specific hexadecimal values for both app and mobile web implementations to ensure consistent rendering across different contexts.

Comprehensive view of newsletter template variations with a detailed breakdown of color mapping between modes. The zoomed section illustrates how our design system colors adapt when email clients force dark mode. While we have limited control over how colors translate in forced dark mode across some email platforms, we've carefully accounted for potential accessibility issues by adjusting graphics, text treatments, and color combinations that typically don't render well.

Example treatments showing how newsletter design elements adapt between light and dark modes across various email clients, demonstrating consistent visual hierarchy while maintaining readability in both themes.

Views of The Washington Post's typography system, which is implemented as text styles in Figma. The text styles were mapped to define their relationships as they translate from our website experience to newsletter formats. This helps maintain visual hierarchy and consistency when adapting content across different contexts and layouts.

Through close collaboration with engineering and product design teams, I refined these components through iterative feedback sessions, creating template variations that supported different content strategies while maintaining visual consistency.

The UI kit streamlined The Post's newsletter design process by providing reusable components that teams quickly adopted. Editorial teams found it easier to create newsletters and make template updates. The system also helped teams test and implement design changes more efficiently. By providing clear specifications to developers, we built a foundation that could grow while maintaining high design standards.

The system's success led to its adoption across all newsletter initiatives, proving its versatility and effectiveness. Editorial teams reported greater ease in creating new newsletter concepts, and developers benefited from standardized specifications that streamlined the implementation process. Most importantly, the UI kit established a foundation for future growth, allowing us to efficiently scale our newsletter offerings while maintaining design and brand standards.

The Impact