Email Design Systems: The Role of Designers, Coders, & Marketers

What if you could cut production time by 50% with a framework that revolutionizes your workflow?

Today’s email landscape—with its fragmented rendering engines, strict accessibility standards, and rising demand for personalization—has outgrown static, one-off designs.

It simply doesn’t scale. Besides, marketers spend up to 41% of email production time on building, 40% on designing, and 39% on testing—an enormous investment! 

Enter the email design system: a framework of reusable email templates, modules, and coded components that enables marketing teams to build emails with consistency, efficiency, and accessibility at scale. Much like web design systems such as Atomic Design or Google’s Material Design, an email design system bridges brand consistency with technical flexibility.

(We have our own design system at Email Mavlers, and our entire team swears by it!)

However, such a design system doesn’t exist in a vacuum. 

Its success depends on three key groups—designers, developers, and marketers—working in unison. Each plays a critical role in shaping not just the aesthetics and function of emails, but the customer experience that ultimately drives conversions.

In today’s article, we explore how each discipline contributes, how to create such a system, and what the best practices are for scaling systems. Let’s begin!

What exactly is an email design system?

An email design system is a comprehensive, living framework that defines how an email team approaches email creation and execution. It brings together:

• Reusable components: Modular blocks such as headers, hero banners, content sections, and footers that can be repurposed across campaigns to save time and maintain consistency.
  
• Email coding standards & design system: Best practices like inline CSS, table-based layouts, and responsive design to ensure that emails render reliably across clients.
  
• Visual guidelines: Brand-approved rules for typography, color palettes, imagery, spacing, and layout that make every email recognizable and aligned with the overall identity.
  
• Content practices: Standards for tone of voice, personalization, and message hierarchy to ensure communication is not only visually strong but relevant and legally sound.

What makes it a “living framework” is its ability to evolve over time. 

Source: Email Design Systems 

As brands/organizations refresh their identity, launch new modules, or adapt to new devices and inbox behaviors, the design system grows with them.

At its core, an email design system serves as a single source of truth for everyone involved: designers, coders, and marketers. Instead of debating fonts, layouts, or technical fixes for every campaign, teams rely on the system’s standards and components. This results in faster campaign production, stronger brand consistency, fewer errors, and smoother collaboration. 

For an email design system to truly work, designers, coders, and marketers each play a distinct yet interconnected role. The table below highlights:

• The role of designers in email design systems
• The role of coders in email design systems, and 
• Distinct responsibilities in email design systems

When these roles align, email programs run with both speed and impact—creativity flows from designers, reliability is secured by coders, and marketers ensure campaigns land with the right audience at the right moment.

Benefits of an email system: Design, dev, & marketing

An email design system offers significant benefits for marketing teams and organizations by fostering efficiency, brand consistency, reduced errors, and scalability in email production:

• Shared documentation and clear guidelines define team responsibilities in email design systems, minimize unnecessary back-and-forth, and speed up the workflow.

• Modular frameworks mean that updates are made in one place and reflected everywhere, significantly reducing room for errors and maintaining high quality.

• QA processes are expedited because the templates adhere to consistent email coding standards and design systems.

• Non-design departments can participate in the process, making collaboration easier and keeping communications running smoothly.

• Reliable frameworks reduce cognitive load and stress for designers and developers, improving overall job satisfaction and outcome quality.

• Teams fix bugs or errors once in core modules, eliminating recurring issues. 

• Accessible to team members with varying skill levels, allowing junior marketers or new contributors to maintain standards and contribute effectively.

Now, at the same time, it is equally important to consider a few drawbacks of such a system. Creating and maintaining a robust email design system demands a significant investment of time and resources from both designers and developers. Teams also need an initial period of training to learn how to use the system effectively. 

Although predefined components can feel limiting at first, over time they relieve designers from repetitive “pixel pushing” and enable greater focus on impactful creative work.

Building an email template design system

The process of creating a single email can drag on for weeks, slowed down by responsive design challenges, client testing, personalization demands, and lengthy reviews. An email template design system solves these issues by introducing standardization, modularity, and also no-code workflow that accelerates production while safeguarding consistency.

Key components & concepts

• Atomic design: Adapted from web design, this method breaks emails into core building blocks: 

• Atoms: Base elements such as text, images, buttons, and links.
  
• Molecules: Groups of atoms, like a header or footer.
  
• Organisms: Larger, more complex modules or complete templates.
  

• Design standards: The brand’s foundation—logos, icons, imagery, and a defined color palette to maintain visual consistency.
  
• Fonts: Web-safe fonts ensure consistent rendering across inboxes. Custom or Google fonts require fallbacks since not all clients support them.
  
• Grid system: An 8-pixel grid prevents visual distortion across screen sizes. A 600-pixel width is the common baseline for email layouts.
  
• Naming conventions: Clear, standardized naming (e.g., name/type/size/color) avoids duplication and confusion in component libraries.
  
• Modules: Pre-designed, reusable blocks that marketers can easily assemble into campaigns.
  
• Documentation: Often overlooked but vital, documentation guides the team on when and how to use each component, ensuring adoption and alignment.

These building blocks would embody email design system best practices, ensuring scalability and consistency while helping clarify email designer vs developer responsibilities across projects.

Source: Email On Acid

How to create an email design system?

Building an email design system is a structured process that requires both analysis and planning. 

The goal is to create a unified framework that balances brand consistency with production efficiency. Each step ensures that the system is comprehensive, scalable, and easy for every team member to use. The email design system process includes:

• Design audit: Are you a designer? The role of designers in email design systems requires you to gather and review existing email assets and campaigns. Identify what’s effective, and decide what to retain, refine, or retire.
  
• Industry research: Benchmark against competitors to spot gaps and discover new components, especially for transactional or high-use cases.
  
• Lay the foundations: Define the essentials—brand imagery, color palette, fonts, and grid system. These elements anchor the design system.
  
• Categorize and name: Standardize naming conventions and organize assets systematically to avoid confusion and duplication.
  
• Build components and modules: Develop both atomic elements (buttons, spacers, text blocks) and larger pre-designed modules (headers, footers, hero sections).
  
• Develop templates: Assemble purpose-built templates tailored to common scenarios such as newsletters, welcome flows, or promotional campaigns.
  
• Document everything: Produce clear, role-specific guidelines so designers, coders, and marketers know when and how to use each component effectively.

By thus clarifying the email design team roles, this email design system process ensures balance between creative flexibility and production efficiency.

Building inhouse vs. outsourcing

There are two primary approaches when creating an email design system: building it internally or outsourcing to external experts. The choice depends on available resources, timelines, and long-term goals for scalability and control:

• In-house: The most common method, enabling faster email production and tighter integration with internal workflows. It requires a dedicated system or tool to manage and maintain the design system efficiently.
  
• Outsourced: Ideal for teams lacking internal design resources. Agencies or freelancers can build the system, which the internal team can then use via a drag-and-drop platform for ongoing email creation.

The time required to establish a design system ranges from a few weeks to several months. Factors include team size, available expertise, and whether the templates are hand-coded or built using no-code tools.

Creating a Figma-to-email workflow

A streamlined Figma-to-email workflow ensures that designs translate seamlessly into responsive, production-ready emails. By following core principles, teams can maintain design consistency, reuse components, and reduce reliance on manual coding.

Source: Figma Templates

Key principles

• Auto Layout is essential: Auto Layout in Figma ensures responsive designs. Padding, spacing, and alignment settings directly influence how designs convert into valid HTML.
  
  • Keyboard Shortcut: Use Shift + A to add Auto Layout to any frame.
    
  • Frame Width Options:
    
    • Fixed: Specific pixel width.
      
    • Hug: Adjusts frame width to content.
      
    • Fill Container: Expands to fill parent frame—recommended for responsive text.
      
• Responsive behavior: Control how blocks adapt on mobile.
  
  • Cards property: Stacks child elements vertically on mobile.
    
  • Reverse children property: Mirrors desktop layout while maintaining proper mobile stacking order.
    
• Building and reusing email blocks:
  
  • Block Creation: Build each section (header, text block, footer) as a separate Figma frame with Auto Layout.
    
  • Adding Links: Set the frame type to button or link, then add the URL in the properties panel.
    
  • Using Components: Convert blocks into Figma components to centralize design elements for reuse.
    
  • Building Emails: Create a new template and drag pre-made components onto the canvas, editing content directly in Figma frames.

This workflow streamlines email production, enabling teams to build responsive templates efficiently, maintain brand consistency, and minimize coding effort.

An email design system for Dark Mode

Rather than relying on CSS hacks, a dark mode-specific framework establishes a single source of truth. This not only defines contrast and color use but also integrates marketing input in email design system guidelines for accessibility and readability:

• Audit and test: Review how brand colors render in different dark mode clients; adjust the palette if certain colors appear distorted.
  
• Design for both modes:
  
  • Contrast: Maintain a text-to-background contrast ratio of 4.5:1 or higher.
    
  • Simplify Colors: Fewer colors reduce testing complexity.
    
  • Optimize Images: Use transparent backgrounds; add subtle outlines to logos/icons.
    
  • Background Images: Test with both light and dark text.

Source: Rejoiner

Top 3 tips for handling Dark Mode

1. Build a design system: Invest in a structured system optimized for dark mode to save time in the long run.
   
2. Use fewer colors: Simplified palettes reduce unexpected rendering issues.
   
3. Ensure high contrast: Prioritize readability and accessibility for all users, regardless of display settings.

Email design system best practices for scaling

Scaling an email design system goes beyond building reusable components—it requires processes that maintain consistency, optimize efficiency, and enhance the reader experience. Here are four actionable strategies to help teams level up their systems. 

1. Add character counts

Long, copy-heavy emails can overwhelm readers who spend an average of only nine seconds per email. Setting maximum character counts for each module and template helps:

• Align content and design teams from the start.
  
• Reduce back-and-forth edits.
  
• Improve readability and scannability.
  
• Boost click-through rates by creating curiosity.
  
• Make the brand feel simple and effortless.
  

2. Create dynamic modules

Static modules can quickly clutter your library. Use variables and Boolean properties in tools like Figma to create dynamic modules (light vs. dark, desktop vs. mobile, with/without elements). On the development side, templating languages like Liquid Logic allow single code blocks to adapt dynamically, reducing maintenance effort and ensuring consistency across templates.

3. Define distinct styles for transactional vs marketing emails

Visually differentiating transactional emails prevents customer fatigue and signals purpose immediately. Key distinctions can include:

• Color scheme: Marketing emails are colorful; transactional emails stick to black, white, and gray.
  
• Background/container colors: Consistent gray backgrounds for transactional emails vs. white for marketing.
  
• Iconography: Urgent icons reserved for transactional communications.
  
• Imagery: Simple images in transactional emails vs. lifestyle/product photography in marketing emails.

This approach increases engagement and builds trust for critical communications like payment alerts.

4. Create a roadmap for future design refreshes

A design system should evolve with the brand. Consider having quarterly brainstorming sessions after performance reviews in order to:

• Keep the system fresh and relevant.
  
• Minimize last-minute change requests.
  
• Plan and manage updates systematically.

Scaling requires strong governance, dynamic modules, and crystal-clear differentiation between marketing and transactional emails. These strategies reduce confusion over email designer vs developer responsibilities while reinforcing consistency.

Email system design, dev, & marketing: The takeaway

A design system is more than a collection of templates; it is a strategic framework that unites designers, coders, and marketers under a single source of truth. When implemented thoughtfully, it accelerates production, strengthens brand consistency, and ensures every campaign reaches its audience with maximum impact. 

Investing in a robust email design system is not just about efficiency; it is about creating email campaigns that consistently engage, convert, and reinforce your brand identity.

So then, ready to level up your email program? 

We can integrate your existing email design system into our workflow, allowing us to design and develop emails that align perfectly with your brand. This approach allows your team to retain control over brand identity while we handle the execution. Let’s get started!