Newsletters

01 | The Good Stuff

Powered by CNN, stories of joy and happiness delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

A friendly, color palette that evoked happiness and warm feelings was the main goal to deliver stories of discovery, everyday heroes, inspiring movements, and great things happening in your backyard. 

CNN's red, black, grey, and white is an age-old brand that is recognized globally. It's bold, provocative, and indicates trust. I wanted to explore secondary color options that echoed the brand feel but didn't fit directly into our traditional color palette. 

My goal was to create a modern, bold, friendly, and delightful look for this newsletter. I chose to combine Futura Bold with our in-house font, CNN Slab. This newsletter would be viewed on mobile primarily, so I wanted to make sure the sans serif and slab serif had maximum legibility. I explored different combination options and chose Futura because of its highly symmetrical, geometric curves. In a later variation, the "o" 's from "good" morphs into eyes, forming a smiley face.

Our editorial, audience development, and design team decided to divide the newsletter into sections. Certain stories would fall into these categories, and this helps us deliver good stories every week within a similar context. These are 'Raise a Glass', 'A Bright Idea', 'You Gotta See This', 'Heroes Among Us', 'Wanna Get Away', 'Hear, hear!', 'Who Knew?', 'Tell Us Something Good', 'Happy Birthday to…', and 'Impact Your World' followed by a shameless animal video that nobody could resist.

We have h1, h2, h3 and body styles that divide up each section, but adding in a quick animation (GIF form) as a divider instead could delight readers and visually create a break from the walls of text. I worked with a motion designer on my team to create these short visual elements from the module topic and these were the final animations.

Adding in a header image every week was also an idea that I wanted to explore. With the nature of the newsletter, I thought it would be fun to include a stylized illustration at the top that resonated with a story that week. This image and the logo would be the first visual elements the reader would see, and help set the tone for the stories they are about to read.

The Good Stuff brings joy to our readers with short stories that warm the heart - something that each of us needs once in a while.

E-mail is not an easy product to work with. It harbors many limitations including fonts, HTML/CSS styles, and capabilities. While leading this project, I made sure care went into every design decision including color, ensuring there are no truncation issues and that every reader gets the same version of a newsletter (as much as technically possible). However, I believe that this project was truly worth designing for and I learned a lot in the process. With headlines like mass shootings, crimes and natural disasters (which, are all important to be aware of), the Good Stuff brings joy to our readers with short stories that warm the heart - something that each of us needs once in a while.