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Building an email design system: reusable components that save hours

html_email_wizardEmail Designer

Just like web design systems, email design systems bring consistency and speed to your email program. Here is how we built ours.

Core components

  • Header (logo + navigation)
  • Hero (image + headline + CTA)
  • Content block (text + optional image)
  • Product card (image + title + price + CTA)
  • Footer (links + unsubscribe + address)

Design tokens

We defined colors, typography, spacing, and border-radius as tokens. Every component references these tokens, so a brand refresh is a config change rather than updating 50 templates.

Implementation

With React Email, each component is a typed React component with props for customization. Our marketers request emails by specifying which components they need and providing the content.

#design-system#components#templates
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4 Comments

api_andreaDeveloper

Design tokens for email is such a good practice. When our brand colors changed, updating was a single config change instead of editing 40 templates.

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email_archaeologistEmail Historian

Love the design tokens approach. Email has lagged behind web in adopting design system principles. This should be standard practice.

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template_tina

How many components do you typically need for a complete email design system? We are just starting to build ours.

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html_email_wizardEmail Designer

We have 12 core components that cover 95% of our email needs. Start with header, footer, hero, text block, button, product card, and divider. Add more as needed.

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