Bare Bones 📬 inbox 🚀 launch 🥳 party

October 19, 2022

Code tutorials, design teardowns & thoughts on... email development.

It's finally time to launch Bare Bones 🎉🎉🎉

First off, can I just say... Thank you all for signing up to my mailing list.

It means a lot that you're trusting me (well Revue) with your personal details and are interested in being notified when little ol' me has something to share.

On using Revue for this, when I'm a developer... I have a lot going on, so on top of building something, documenting my findings, creating imagery... I wasn't sure I'd also have time to build a template each send. I also set up this account before Revue's last round of extended outages, which forced A LOT of people to shift away from the platform. I'll see how this goes and if I change my mind I'll let you know, but Revue does have a good reputation for deliverability, so that helps!

Why the delay?

I'm so sorry! Some of you signed up over three months ago 😬

Admittedly, I've had a lot on! Baby duties, day job and then my parents and brother flew over from New Zealand to meet our boy Finn, in person for the first time for his 1st birthday. I also haven't seen them in person in four years. It was a fun month and taking a break from all side projects to be able to spend quality time with my family was the best!

They've left now and it's time to get back to reality. That reality is that all of the time I already spend saving & experimenting with design ideas for email, should be shared to inspire and drive innovation in our industry. Especially for more junior developers. I've had a real urge to share ways for them to upskill quickly and help them to pick up the art of problem solving.

In terms of the website, I am so proud of how it turned out. I spent way too long building the site and it still isn't complete but it works, is usable and is pretty close to 100% across the board in Lighthouse testing 🤘🏾 It was also my first foray into Static Site Generators, specifically 11ty. So the extra time researching the best SSG for my use case and Googling and rabbit holing as I tried to piece together my design was well worth the delay to launch.

Enough Waffling

While building the site, I was also looking into dark/light mode toggles for email. I decided to document the process in the hopes it would be ready to launch as I was completing the main site build.

This has also directly helped with our interactive email API at Mayoris, where I was able to utilise this idea for new survey question types/designs we wanted to integrate to freshen up and bolster our options for current and future partners.

And so, if you haven't already seen in our community Slack or on Twitter - here is my write-up on my HTML & CSS toggle experiment.

Inspired by a dark mode toggle design on Dribbble, I decided to rebuild the toggle for email.

Thanks for stopping by 👋🏾

Check it out. Share it, if you find it interesting. Ask questions in Slack or on Twitter. Wait for the next experiment.

I have a long list of design ideas to build out from Dribbble, ReallyGoodEmails, Bettr.Email, front end newsletters and ideas that pop into my head.

I'm hoping to share something at least once a month but with all of the ideas I have, I'm hoping it'll be more frequent then that.

Until next time,

✌🏾