Sunday Setup — Brand, systems design
Transforming plaintext emails into a recognizable brand.

Engagement was lagging, and readers dropped off before long-term retention.

Sunday Setup had no existing infrastructure to support growth or brand recognition. They relied entirely on the strength of their content—plaintext emails—to do the heavy lifting.

Our goal was to establish a recognizable identity and scalable design infrastructure.

We needed to create systems that could be leveraged easily and open the door to monetization and scaling opportunities. We needed to encourage and support growth without bogging down the lean creation systems already in place.

I decided to build a component library for all core email sections.

Reusable templates and components covered core flows and content types, prioritized readability and brand consistency, and left the door open to future structures and flows.

I documented all brand and component usage as I developed.

Combining component documentation with brand guidelines ensures all future content can be produced with minimal design support or changes to existing workflows.

Within 3 months of rollout, the team reported surpassing all goals... for the year.

Establishing a cohesive brand and systems resulted in higher reader satisfaction, secured sponsorships/partnerships, open rates increasing from 8% to 27%, and CTR rates holding steady around 2.2%.