Are these email trends half baked?

The Email Cookbook... not to be confused with the anarchist cookbook

What's cooking, Email Geek?

Illustrations + huge type + earth tones + rounded corners = ?

Drumroll please... you now have everything you need to cook up an extremely 2026 email.

Unfortunately, that's also a pretty good recipe for looking like everyone else. So instead of telling you what to copy, we dug into why these trends work and the design principles worth stealing long after the trend dies.

Jump into this year's annual design trends reveal and learn something new.

The delicious trends

And now a quick break for an ad...

Articles of the week for anyone tired of looking like everyone else:

Google just made it easier for political emails to reach your inbox

Google is giving qualifying political campaigns a new path around Gmail's spam filters, which makes the rules of deliverability a little more complicated. If you make email for a living, it's worth understanding when—and for whom—the inbox rules can change.

Check your spam folder >

Apparently "✨" isn't an AI disclosure

The EU's new AI guidelines turn disclosures into a design problem: how do you make AI involvement clear without making people hunt for it? And what's actually required?.

Label accordingly >

Your demographics don't have feelings

Demographics tell you who someone is, but they don't necessarily tell you what will make them act. The same psychology behind emotion-led ads can help email makers think beyond segments and build creative around what subscribers actually want or feel.

Find the feeling >

Congratulations, everyone looks like you now

Good creative gets copied faster than ever, which means today's distinctive look can become tomorrow's template. For email makers swimming in the same trends and inspiration, it's a good argument for evolving your creative before everyone else catches up.

Keep getting weird >

And now another quick break for an ad...

Thanks for reading and thinking with us since November 2023.

Mike & the entire RGE team

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