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How did you get into email and design?
My first website was a wrestling fan site in my early teens built with Geocities. That slowly evolved into a more “serious” setup using FrontPage and ASP. At one point I even received a legal letter from WWE asking me to stop using their copyrighted material. I was using their logo and sharing PSD cutouts for download 🙂
I later studied Interactive Multimedia Design at Ulster University, where I really doubled down on my design craft. After graduating, I worked on brochure sites and built CMSs using PHP, WordPress, and Rails.
It wasn’t until 2013, when I joined Mailgun, that I went deep on email. I remember being genuinely shocked that email clients still caused so many challenges. Old rendering engines, tables everywhere, and inconsistent support across clients. At the same time, it felt like designers and marketers were trying to build overly complex templates. That disconnect led me to open source a really simple responsive email template which got a lot of attention at the time and has now been used across thousands of apps.
Since then I’ve shipped a number of related side projects, including HTMLemail.io, Postdrop.io, an email design system for Figma. Today, I’m VP of Design at OneSignal, where I manage a team of talented designers. OneSignal is a customer engagement platform for mobile growth, used by a large percentage of apps for their messaging. My job is to give the team clarity, context, and space to do their best work, while holding a high bar for UX and design quality. I get to think about design and messaging every day.
What are some of your favorite email design trends at the moment?
I’m a big believer in keeping things simple. Don’t overthink your email designs. Focus on strong structure, generous white space, and clear hierarchy. Use one high quality image or graphic and aim for a single, clear goal or CTA for each email.
A lot of brands overcomplicate their emails, often without the expertise or discipline to support that level of complexity. Simple rules are usually more effective and far more scalable.
And don’t underestimate the power of great photography. Brands that invest in professional photography see real returns. It elevates everything around it.
How are you using AI, and what are your go-to AI tools for design?
Over the past couple of years, we’ve really leaned into AI at OneSignal, from leadership down. We’ve encouraged people to explore the tools that work best for them and made it easy to access Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude.
On the design side, we’ve been experimenting a lot with prototyping using tools like v0, Figma Make, Cursor, Lovable, and Claude Code. It’s forcing us to rethink our process and how we collaborate across product, design, and engineering, especially around faster feedback loops with users.
Day to day, I’m personally using Cursor, ChatGPT, Granola and Wispr Flow a lot more, and NotebookLM to help synthesize research and notes.
What’s in your toolbox?
Hardware:
- MacBook Pro M2 14”
- Studio Display
- Keychron Mechanical Keyboard
- Trackpad
- Beats Studio Pro
- iPhone 17 Pro
Software:
- Figma
- Cursor
- Granola
- Wispr Flow
- Things
- Slack
- Gmail
- Chrome
- OneSignal
- Postdrop
- Asana
- Zoom
How do you see the design profession changing in the next 5 years?
I wrote down some thoughts about this recently and honestly, even looking at 2026 feels fast-moving, never mind five years out.
AI tools are giving designers much more agency. We can prototype high fidelity ideas quickly, get them in front of users faster, and even fix UI details directly in production without waiting on long backlogs. That changes how teams operate.
It also means designers need to rely more on intuition, which only comes from learning deeply about users and your ICP. At the same time, the bar is rising. If AI can produce something that looks decent, designers need to be able to produce something meaningfully better.
What’s your favorite email campaign of all time? Why?
I really appreciate when a strong design system carries through into email. That’s hard to do across different teams, tools, and codebases, but when it works, it shows.
Some brands that do this particularly well include Netflix, Airbnb, Anthropic.
What’s your advice for new designers entering the industry in the next few years?
Be curious. Ship often.
Much love,
Andy
Andy has spent two decades building email programs for brands and agencies, and now co-runs Email Love: the inspiration gallery of 481,000+ emails and the Figma plugin that lets teams design, build, and export production-ready email without leaving their design file. He writes about email design systems, production workflow, and where the industry is heading.
Customer.io delivers more impact from every message–unifying data, messaging, and AI into one platform so every customer interaction gets smarter over time. We help teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in-app, and webhooks, using their own first-party data to reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. AI is built into the platform to remove the grunt work, letting marketers focus on strategy, not setup. Over 9,000 brands trust us to power their messaging.
