Geek Chic – Smart Design for the Style Conscious

Client: Carbonetworks helps companies run their Energy, GHG, and Sustainability initiatives like a business – helping provide a consolidated corporate scorecard for measuring performance.came to me with the desire to incorporate their current website design into their newsletter using constant contact’s interface.

Brief: Carbonetworks asked me to design their 2010 greeNews Monthly newsletter, basing the design on the current 2010 website design while utilizing the back end management tools and template interface of Constant Contact.

Project: Because the client knew exactly what they wanted, gave a crystal clear brief and included existing design files this project ran smooth as silk. Using Photoshop, I took their existing website header and edited the image for content, cropping the existing image for size and then font matching the logo for the newsletter header, in this case Century Gothic with height/width and letter spread adjustments. I then used the DigitalColor Meter app in Mac OSX to match the font/background/TOC header colors to the existing website colors and finally tweaked the padding and margin entry’s to best utilize the 600px width recommendations for email newsletters.

Lessons Learned: Working with businesses and corporations is always fun for me for several reasons. More often than not they have a clear vision, a well defined timeline and they recognize what your time is worth. In addition, they like everything in writing which seriously cuts down on miscommunications, which I know is every designers bugaboo. There’s nothing worse than miscommunication and unrealized expectations. In this case, lines were open like Niagara Falls and the project was delivered in no time and exceeded the client’s expectations. Now that’s what I like to hear.

Tools Used: CSS scripting & Constant Contact.

Challenges: Constant Contact does a nice job of providing front end interface tools for novice designers to make tweaks to Constant Contact’s existing template selections. However, if you have a deeper understanding of css scripting and want to really hack away at your newsletter template, the Constant Contact interface gets clumsy real quick. It’s not that you can’t do what you want, but it does mean a lot of back and forth page reloads, and constant ‘save & preview’ requests. All this could be tied up so nicely in a smooth as silk ajax interface, but I guess there’s just not a whole lot of money in newsletter management. Best solution for the moment, would be for constant contact to break the editing tools out into their own window entirely so the advanced users don’t have to keep switching back and forth to make tweaks.