Weekly digest email template

The template is built as a single-column, 600px roundup on a cool gray-white background (#f3f4f2) with near-black ink (#2b2a28) and one smoky-jade accent (#596d69). That restraint is the point. The jade shows up in exactly four places: the small masthead square, the uppercase kicker labels, the Read arrows, and the button. Nothing else competes for attention.

The masthead is quiet. A small jade square sits next to the Cadence Weekly wordmark on the left, with the issue meta (Issue 47, Jun 19) set small and letter-spaced on the right. A hairline divides it from the body. Below that, a serif intro line tells the reader what to do with the email: skim the kickers, open what fits, ignore the rest. It is signed by a named editor, Priya, so the send reads like it came from a person.

The body is five linked items, nothing more. Each one follows the same pattern: an uppercase jade kicker (Engineering, Pricing, Hiring, Product, Worth a click), a serif headline of around 25px, a one or two sentence summary in gray, and a jade Read arrow. Sparse 1px hairlines separate the items, not every row, so the list breathes instead of looking like a table.

The single-message discipline is the part most digests get wrong. There are five things to read, but only one button: Read the full issue. The links inside each item are quiet text arrows. The button is the one loud element on the page, and it sits at the bottom after the reader has scanned everything. Two typefaces carry the hierarchy: Schibsted Grotesk for labels and summaries, Newsreader serif for the headlines. The contrast between grotesque and serif is what makes a plain list feel edited rather than auto-generated.

Email clients are not browsers. Outlook on Windows uses Word to render HTML, Gmail strips out anything it does not like, and a div-and-flexbox layout falls apart the moment it leaves your design tool. This template is built the old, reliable way so it holds together everywhere.

The whole layout is tables, not divs. A full-width background table wraps a fixed 600px container table, and every row is a real table cell with explicit padding. There is an MSO conditional block that hands Outlook its own 600px table so the email does not blow out to full width. All the styling that matters lives inline, on the elements, because Gmail discards most of what sits in a style block in the head.

The text is live text, not an image of text. Every headline, label, and summary is selectable, searchable, and resizes cleanly. That keeps the email accessible, keeps it out of the spam-heavy image-only bucket, and means it still reads if images are blocked. The two web fonts load through Google Fonts for clients that support them and fall back to a system sans and a system serif in Outlook and elsewhere, so the hierarchy survives even when the custom fonts do not.

The button is bulletproof. For most clients it is a styled anchor with a solid jade background and padding-driven height. For Outlook it has a VML roundrect fallback so the shape and fill render instead of collapsing into bare blue text. On mobile, the one allowed media query widens the button to full width and bumps up the headline sizes. The file also declares a light color scheme and uses the Apple disable-reformatting meta tag, so dark-mode clients leave the light, high-contrast palette alone instead of inverting it into mud.

This is a paste-and-go file. You do not need a design tool or an export step.

In Klaviyo: create a new email template, choose the blank or HTML option, and drag in an HTML block (or use the full-template HTML import). Paste the entire file. The 600px container and table structure carry over intact, and Klaviyo will wire up its own unsubscribe and preferences links where the footer placeholders sit.

In Mailchimp: start a new campaign, pick Code your own, then Paste in code, and drop the whole file in. Mailchimp keeps the inline CSS as is and merges its required footer and unsubscribe tags.

Then make it yours. Swap the one jade accent (#596d69) for your brand color everywhere it appears, change the masthead wordmark and the issue meta, and replace the five kicker labels, headlines, summaries, and links with your real items. Update the editor intro and signature, the button label and link, and the footer address. Add or remove items by copying or deleting one item block, hairline included.

Before you send, test it. Run a real inbox preview or send yourself a seed so you can check Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and dark mode, then confirm every link points where it should. Once it looks right, send or schedule it like any other campaign.