Newsletter Template Design
Amazon - Internal Newsletters
Overview
Yes, you indeed saw the MS Excel logo in the thumbnail. Who says design has to be on Adobe or Figma?
In this project you'll see the design template I made on Microsoft Excel for an internal team in Amazon to share quarterly internal newsletters about their progress, highs, lows and achievements with other teams, stakeholders and team members. The team that wanted the newsletters made, had decided that it would be the project manager's responsibilty to come up with content and then a designer would design a newsletter around that content. The problem was that there were very few designers in the team and we were already drowning in deadlines.
So I figured why not design a newsletter that the project manager could edit themselves? And I made the template on excel. The template can be used by anyone in the team thereby promoting frugality. Another bonus was that the text in the email can be edited within any email tool like Outlook, Apple Mail or Gmail before sending it out.
Problem Statement
Making newsletters in this team was a collaborative effort. The project manager would write out the content and send it to a designer who would then create a design based on this content and then send back to the project manager for review. If there are any content changes, errors or design changes needed, the project manager would send all this as feedback to the designer. The designer would edit it the design accordingly and send it back for review. After the reviewing and feedback cycle is completed and the project manager and designer are happy with the newsletter, they then send it to upper management for a final review. If there are any changes given by upper management, it would go back to the designer to edit and send back for final review once again. After the final-review cycle is completed, the newsletter is then scheduled to be sent out by the project manager. This lifecyle of making a newsletter takes upto 2 hours & 40 minutes/designer and 2 hours 30 minutes/project manager, a total of about 5 hours of employee time spent on this activity.
Old Lifecycle of making a Newsletter
Solution
With my newsletter design template, the project manager populates their content and images into an already existing newsletter design and then sends it out as an email for review. The email can be edited during review by the upper management instead of needing to send it back to the project manager for edits. The time taken to create a newsletter is cut down to 2 hours and 5 minutes/project manager and no design time is spent. This is a reduction of employee time spent from 5+ hours to 2 hours and 5 minutes on this activity.
New Lifecycle of making a Newsletter
Colors
Colors in dark theme
#2F242F
#3C2F3C
#7D637D
#624B5E
#FFFFFF
Colors in light theme
#C4B4C3
#B29CAF
#DAD1DA
#E2DBE3
#333333
Typography
For the font, I chose to use Amazon's own "Ember" to keep the newsletters 'on-brand' and also to ensure that it will always display as intended on everyone's computers as all employees' computers come with Ember pre-installed.
I used the perfect fourths ratio which has font scaling increments of 1.333 for the font sizes as it is a medium contrast font scale best suited to newsletters, brochures and wesbites. Below is my font scaling numbers, of which I have chosen to only use P1, H5 and H2 for the body, sub-headings and main heading respectively so as to not add too many different levels of visual hierarchy in the content sectioning.
H1 - 72 pts
H2 - 54 pts
H3 - 40 pts
H4 - 30 pts
H5 - 22 pts
H6 - 16 pts
P1 - 12 pts
How it Works
You'd start by opening the excel file that contains the newsletter design. Upon opening the file, you will notice that there are six sections for content.
Text content
Add all your text in just you would with a normal excel file by clicking on the cell and editing the text. I already formatted the file with colors, font size and Amazon's trademarked Ember Font type-face so you'd only need to change the information being displayed. You can delete sections that aren't needed using regular excel formatting capabilities.
Image content
Start by choosing 6 images for the 6 sections in the template. The template works best with images of dimensions 622 x 754 pixels. You could either source 6 images of these dimensions or use the Photoshop template I created that will quickly convert and export out your chosen images at this size.
If you already have your images sized at the dimensions 622 x 754 px you can now insert them into the template by following the below steps:
- Click on the cell with an image inside it. Then click on the "Insert" tab and then click "Pictures" > "Picture from File"
- In the ensuing dialogue box, select your first section's image and then click "Insert"
- Next click the "Place in Cell" button for it to snap to fit within the cell's boundaries.
- Repeat this for all 6 sections images.
The next step is to select the entire design from excel, copy it to your clipboard and then paste it into a new email on either Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail, check for any spelling errors, image alignment issues and overall content accuracy and hit send.
Text content
Add all your text in just you would with a normal excel file by clicking on the cell and editing the text. I already formatted the file with colors, font size and Amazon's trademarked Ember Font type-face so you'd only need to change the information being displayed. You can delete sections that aren't needed using regular excel formatting capabilities..
Image content
Start by choosing 6 images for the 6 sections in the template. The template works best with images of dimensions 622 x 754 pixels. You could either source 6 images of these dimensions or use the Photoshop template I created that will quickly convert and export out your chosen images at this size.
If you already have your images sized at the dimensions 622 x 754 px you can now insert them into the template by following the below steps:
- Click on the cell with an image inside it. Then click on the "Insert" tab and then click "Pictures" > "Picture from File"
- In the ensuing dialogue box, select your first section's image and then click "Insert"
- Next click the "Place in Cell" button for it to snap to fit within the cell's boundaries.
- Repeat this for all 6 sections images.
The next step is to select the entire design from excel, copy it to your clipboard and then paste it into a new email on either Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail, check for any spelling errors, image alignment issues and overall content accuracy and hit send.
Newsletter Design
Another example of Newsletter Design
Photoshop Template to resize images
To use my photoshop image template, you'd need to have Photoshop installed on your computer. I have compiled all of the necessary files and folders into a zipped folder. Upon opening it you will see the below folders. Add your 6 images of various sizes/dimensions to the "Content images" folder and rename them as "image-1", "image-2" and so on for all 6 images.
Open the Photoshop file named "Newsletter-1-images.psd" and right click on the layer named "image-1" and then click "Relink to File"
In the ensuing dialogue box, select "image-6.png" and click "Place" - Now you'll see the image in the Photoshop file being replaced with your 6th image. The Photoshop file should automatically relink all 6 images to your 6 images in order. In case it doesn't, repeat the step for "image-5", "image-4" and so on until all 6 images are replaced. After adding in all the images, use Command+T or Ctrl+T to resize the images so that they fit inside the canvas.
After resizing all the images, save the photoshop file and close it. Now open the "Newsletter-1-image-assets" folder and you'll see your 6 images resized to the desired dimensions of 622 x 754 px. You can now add these into the Newsletter design excel file.
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