Overview

Welcome to the Email Design Systems documentation! This section will help you understand what design systems are, why they're valuable, and how to create and use them in your email templates.

What is a Design System?

A design system is a reusable library of branded email components, layouts, and base styles that ensures consistency across all your email templates. Instead of building each email from scratch, you can leverage pre-built, on-brand components and layouts that your entire team can use.

Think of it as your email brand's toolkit: a centralized collection of design decisions, component building blocks, and templates that all work together seamlessly.

Why Use a Design System?

Design systems offer several key benefits:

• Brand Consistency: Every email reflects your brand identity through shared colors, typography, and spacing

• Faster Template Creation: Build emails quickly by combining existing components instead of coding from scratch

• Team Alignment: Your entire team works with the same approved components and patterns

• Easier Maintenance: Update brand guidelines in one place, and changes apply across all templates using that design system

Key Parts of a Design System

Components

Reusable MJML sections organized by category. Components are the building blocks you'll drag onto your email canvas. Examples include headers, content blocks, buttons, and footers.

Layouts

Full email templates that serve as starting points for new emails. Layouts provide a pre-structured, ready-to-customize foundation instead of starting with a blank canvas.

Base Styles

Global typography, colors, spacing, and other styling applied automatically to all templates using this design system. Base styles ensure visual consistency without needing to set styling on individual elements.

Body Width

The default width setting for emails created from your design system (typically 600px for email standards compliance).

Permissions

Only workspace owners can create and edit design systems. However, once a design system is set up, team members with the appropriate permissions can create new emails using the design system.

Next Steps

Ready to get started? Check out these guides:

• Creating a Design System - Step-by-step instructions for building your first design system

• Using a Design System - Learn how to leverage your design system when creating emails