YOW.tv Email

Designing the one surface I don’t control.

Company

YOW.tv

My Role

Product Design Intern

Tools

Claude Design · Claude Code · HTML/CSS · HubSpot · Figma

Timeline

Jul – Aug 2026

Description

YOW.tv is an indie-film streaming platform. Its lifecycle email went out on templates nobody had designed, into inboxes that rewrite what you send them.

Context

My manager asked me for email banners. The one we chose floated on the dark page like a sticker, and instead of redrawing it I asked how our emails looked at all. I rebuilt the set on flat images for mail client rendering consistency, then built the production workflow around it, because an image was the one thing nobody but me could edit at the time. Four of the seven platform templates are deployed and sending, reaching real recipients.

I was asked for banners; the banner was the smallest thing wrong

This project was mine end to end: the rendering research, the tests, every template, the HTML, and the workflow the team runs it on. The brand the templates are built from is the branding lead’s, Greg’s. My manager, Jack, granted the project and runs the sends.

The banner failed, and the failure was three levels up


”Our campus premiere campaign is about to launch. Can you draw some email banners for that?” Jack asked. Straightforward enough. I put together 48 with Claude Design and we picked one for its simplicity and contrast. Dropped into a template, it stopped reading as a banner and started reading as a sticker on a dark page.

48 email banners on a dark board, laid out as eight rows of six, all at the same wide, short proportion. They run from type-only lockups in white and yellow, through solid yellow fields with black type, orange-to-red and magenta gradients, film-strip perforations along the top and bottom edges, and strips of film-poster photography. The wording repeats across the set: Campus Premiere, From Campus to Career, Free to Join. Built to Deliver., Where Streaming Meets Social, and A Launchpad for the Next Generation of Filmmakers. None of the 48 is outlined or otherwise marked as chosen.

I had never designed for email, so before redrawing anything I looked at what we already sent. Jack set me up in HubSpot: everything centered, none of it following the brand book, images at whatever resolution they arrived in. That is more than an aesthetic complaint. What made it a project is that email rendering is deterministic per client. A message that looks broken to us is broken for everyone on that client, and the company has more than 50,000 monthly active users. Jack told me to fix it.



I built the fix the whole field recommends, and it changed nothing


Dark mode was the first thing I checked, because YOW is a dark-first brand. Every email-development guide gives the same answer: a prefers-color-scheme block plus the two proprietary attribute hooks Outlook exposes. So I built the same email twice with Claude Code, variant A with none of it and variant B with all of it, sent both to real accounts on real devices, and had them opened and shot in six clients, light and dark, expecting B to hold.

Headed: Variant A carried no dark-mode mitigations. Variant B carried all of them. Two blocks, one per client. The first is labeled gmail, android, dark mode, and 1.55:1 as rendered; the second yahoo, web, dark mode, and 1.13:1 as rendered. Each block holds the same call-to-action strip twice, tagged variant a and variant b, cropped to the yellow field alone: the words Skip the algorithm, pick your own Friday, above a dark button reading See this week’s picks. Within each client the two variants are identical.

The two variants always rendered the same. The only pixels that differed were the ones naming which variant it was. Six rules came out of the captures, every one design-side, because there is no lever on the other side to pull.



Trading editability for brand consistency


Web fonts do not load in Gmail or Yahoo, so of every hundred people who open a YOW email, two or three see the brand typeface and the rest see Arial. And opaque image pixels were the only element that came through every rendering untouched. The question was clear: where is the balance point between a wall of Arial and making a PNG for every send?

Headed: Which blocks are pictures, and what that costs. On the left, the YOW.tv welcome email rendered whole: the wordmark, a headline reading You Joined A Movement, three paragraphs of body copy, a yellow call-to-action slab reading Ditch the algorithm, discover something real, and a footer carrying the wordmark, social icons and the unsubscribe line. On the right, five rows naming each region and how it is built: Header, image block; Title, image block; Body Copy, live text; CTA Strip, image block; Footer, live text.

The answer was obvious enough. What has to change stays live text; what carries the brand becomes an image. In the client that inverts hardest you get a white page with black body copy punctuated by dark, on-brand blocks, which reads as a layout rather than an accident. What it costs is written in my own constraints document: copy changes for those branded blocks need a designer. At that point the only designer was me.

The Outcome: The Same Email in Every Client


What the team has is seven templates in HubSpot, a custom content module their own staff fill in, three preference-center pages, and a workflow that tells whoever makes the next image exactly how to make it, as long as they have Photoshop installed.

Four YOW.tv email templates side by side at one scale on a dark ground, labeled above as a welcome, a submission receipt, a ticket closure and a Campus Premiere invitation. All four open on the YOW.tv wordmark and the same two-line header band — a white line over a yellow line with a short yellow rule beneath — and the fourth adds a CAMPUS PREMIERE lockup at the top right. The welcome and the submission receipt each end on a yellow call-to-action slab carrying a black button; the ticket closure ends on body copy, and the Campus Premiere invitation ends on a gray What happens next? panel of three bullets. All four carry the same footer: wordmark, four social icons, unsubscribe line and postal address.

Template Family: One Look, Seven Different Errands


A welcome, a drip, a submission receipt, a support-ticket closure, two Campus Premiere invitations and a weekly picks edition have almost nothing in common as messages. Three branded parts hold them together visually. Every export exists twice, desktop and mobile, re-typeset rather than scaled. An eighth template, the one-time passcode, is built on the same parts but sits outside HubSpot.

Headed: The rule that stops a dead fix coming back. Under the label eight email templates, eight cards — welcome-a, welcome-drip-a, cp-student-a, cp-faculty-a, submission-a, ticket-closure-a, fni-a and otp-a. Seven read HubSpot + preview; otp-a reads preview only — no HubSpot file, set in the same gray as the others with no color flag. Under the label three preference-center pages, three more cards: subscription-preference, subscription-update and unknown-subscription-preference, each marked page. Beneath, a code panel headed welcome-a.hubspot.html, lines 26 to 29, above the stylesheet, holding an HTML comment: no @media prefers-color-scheme dark and no data-ogsc or data-ogsb rules, because the round-1 probe measured both as completely inert for this audience, deliberately omitted.

Weekly Picks: Editable Content Inside a Locked Layout


The weekly Friday Night Indie used to be made by cloning last week’s email. It is the only one whose content changes every time, so it is the only one built as a custom module: two featured picks fixed at two, and a grid of four to eight defaulting to six. Staff get a plain form per pick and no way to move anything. The watch button is baked as an image too. No matter how many titles go in, the email always looks like the same family.

A HubSpot email editor at full width. On the left, the Edit Weekly Picks form for pick 1 of 2, headed It Had to Be You with the note Always exactly 2 — the large highlighted picks at the top of the email — and fields for Poster image (with a thumbnail and Replace and Remove links), Alt text, Genre tag, Title, Description and Watch link, each with its help text; the Watch link field is empty. On the right, the email preview: the first pick renders complete with poster, a yellow DRAMA tag, title, description and a yellow Watch Now button; the second pick is unfilled, showing an empty gray poster box, its tag and its button but no title or description. Below, a More Indie Picks heading over eight empty gray placeholder tiles in two rows of four. The window chrome reads New email, Preview & test, Review and send, and an estimated size of 43kb.

Preference Pages: Holding the Brand on the Way Out


I found these by accident, clicking through my own test send. The unsubscribe and preference pages were in the same state the emails had been in. I rebuilt all three as HTML directly, without Figma, on the language and assets the email templates had already established.

Three YOW.tv preference-center pages side by side on a dark ground, labeled above as Update Confirmation, Unknown Contact and Preferences, each carrying the same masthead, type and ground as the emails, with the platform’s own form output held inside that frame. A line along the foot, level with the bottom of the Preferences page, records that the three shown here are local previews and that the forms approximate the platform’s own markup.

Impact


Four of the seven platform templates are deployed in HubSpot and sending, reaching real recipients. The set replaced templates that followed no brand book, checked against a measured model of the renderings rather than against one dark Figma frame. The weekly edition no longer has to be cloned to be made.

Two YOW.tv submission-receipt emails side by side, labeled Before and After, both cropped part-way down rather than shown whole. On the left the template that was replaced: a masthead carrying the wordmark and an Experience the new Indie lockup over a thin gradient rule, then a centered title-case headline in yellow reading We Received Your Submission And We’re Excited To Dive In!, left-aligned body copy, and a stock poster collage with the words Films Worth Finding across it. On the right the same message rebuilt: the wordmark alone, then a large left-aligned two-line headline, Your Film is in white over IN THE QUEUE in yellow, a short yellow rule, and the same copy reset larger. Both crops cut off mid-content.

The succession is the part that has not shipped


Choosing pictures over live text bought consistency and charged editability, so the workflow around it was mine to build: one Photoshop file per image block, named for the file it produces and fixed at its dimensions. Somebody exports, Jack swaps it into HubSpot, the email sends. I am the only designer on it, and without that loop I am the single point of failure.


The branding lead has produced an image from the named frames, which is the step it was all built to make routine. But the weekly picks edition, the one piece that would let somebody make a YOW email without me, has not had its first week, and the last open question in my handoff document, who sources the poster art, is one I did not answer. Whether my manager has swapped an image in without me, I do not know.

Credit


Manager — Jack Patrick. Granted the project, and runs the sends.

Branding — Greg Kupiec. The brand, and the imagery the workflow hands to.