Email Template System, Coded and Dark-Mode Tested

The deliverable is a module set inside your ESP with the compliance regions locked, so a campaign manager can build a send at nine in the morning and cannot delete the warning statement, the marketing authorisation number or the unsubscribe link. One number governs most of the build: 102KB, the point at which Gmail clips a message and hides everything below the cut, the unsubscribe link included. Our templates come in under it with real content in place, which usually means the hero carousel someone asked for does not survive the first review. How the system is put together: Modules built as Klaviyo universal content, Braze content blocks or Iterable snippets, so a footer change is one edit rather than forty. Table layout with role set to presentation, ghost tables inside MSO conditional comments, and VML where an Outlook background image is unavoidable, because Outlook on Windows still renders through Word. Hybrid layout so the Gmail app on Android, which ignores media queries for non-Gmail accounts, still stacks properly rather than shrinking to nothing. Images at two-times for retina. No web font carrying meaning that the system stack cannot carry when it fails to load, which it will. Dark mode: The colour-scheme and supported-colour-schemes declarations first, then honest expectations. Apple Mail, iOS and Outlook on macOS honour prefers-color-scheme. Gmail and Outlook.com force inversion and cannot be fully overridden by anyone, whatever a blog post claims. So logos ship as artwork that survives inversion rather than as a white PNG that becomes a grey block, and every hex value in the palette is chosen with partial inversion in mind. We check this on real devices in the seed set, not only on a rendering service. Accessibility: Language attribute set so screen readers do not guess. Heading order semantic rather than decorative. Alt text on every image, styled so the blocked-image state still reads as a sentence. Body text at 4.5 to 1 contrast against its own background in both modes. Sixteen pixel body copy, forty-four pixel tap targets. Read back with VoiceOver before handover. In pharma and insurance this is not a courtesy; it is the difference between a mandatory disclosure being present and being merely technically present. What we will not build: Interactive or kinetic email in a regulated category. The fallback state is precisely where mandatory copy goes missing, and no client has ever thanked us for a carousel. AMP for email. Image-only emails, which are a spam signal and unreadable with images off. And a template that requires you to email us to change a price. If the client cannot edit it, we built it wrong. Handover: Source in a Git repository you own, a screenshot set per module across the tested client list, and a two-hour session with the person who will actually build the sends rather than with the person who commissioned the work. Thirty days of fixes on anything rendering incorrectly on the tested clients. Who this is not for: A brand that wants one beautiful email. That is a design job and any good studio will do it faster and cheaper. A team with no in-house owner for the ESP, because a module system with nobody maintaining it decays into one-off files inside two quarters and you will have paid for the decay. And anyone whose brand guidelines were written for print. We will push back on hairline rules, justified text and eleven point body copy, and if those are not negotiable we are the wrong shop for you.