Designs and Templates
A design is the wrapper; a template is the message. Most confusion about e-mail here comes from conflating them.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Layout & Pages:
- E-mail Designs — the wrappers
- E-mail Templates — the messages
What a design holds
Three parts: what goes above the content, a default body treatment, and what goes below. In practice that is your header, your styling and your footer — logo, colours, address, unsubscribe line, small print.
What a template holds
The message itself — the subject and the words specific to that communication, with whatever merge fields it needs.
Why the separation earns its place
Because the wrapper changes for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual message. A rebrand, a new logo, a change of registered address, a legally required line in the footer.
With one design, that is one edit. Without the separation, it is every template you have — and you will miss some, so a proportion of your mail carries the old address indefinitely.
Keep layout out of templates
The discipline that makes it work. If a template carries its own header and footer, it has stopped using the design and will not follow the next change.
Templates should be content. When you find layout creeping in, that is a sign the design is missing something the author needed.
Designs are configurable
A design can expose its own fields, so the same wrapper can vary — a colour, a logo, a strapline — without duplicating the whole thing. That is usually better than a second design.
How many designs?
Usually one. Occasionally two, where you genuinely have distinct identities — a customer brand and an internal one, or two trading names.
A design per department or per message type is a mistake that reveals itself at the next rebrand, when there are nine to update instead of one.
The footer is where obligations live
Company registration details, unsubscribe links, regulatory statements. Holding them in the design means they are on every message by construction, rather than depending on whoever wrote each template remembering.
Worked example
An organisation runs one design carrying its logo, colours, registered address and unsubscribe line, with a configurable accent colour. Forty-odd templates carry only their own content. When the registered address changed, the edit took two minutes and every future message was correct — including templates nobody had looked at in two years.
Recommendations
- One design unless you have genuinely separate identities.
- Keep templates to content, layout in the design.
- Put obligations in the footer, not in each template.
- Use design fields rather than creating a second design.