Please review our tutorial video or scroll below for step-by-step instructions:
The Email Designer is a drag-and-drop design canvas used to more easily build and design beautiful emails. We put together this guide to help you understand how to use the DailyStory Email Designer.
The Email Designer has 4 main sections:
The top menu bar displays the name of the email you are editing and also show contextual buttons.
The contextual buttons shown in the top menu bar will change when widgets on the design canvas are selected.
A selected widget may also be removed by clicking the trash can or pressing the delete button when the item is selected..
Be cautious making direct changes to the HTML of the email in the HTML designer. Emails built with the designer are optimized for multiple devices and screen sizes. Change to CSS, Plain Text, and AMP may be done safely.
The Design canvas is where widgets are placed or selected by dragging-and-dropping them from the Widget Menu.
The Email Designer is built to support working with pre-made email templates or building new emails 100% in the designer.
WarningIf you are working with a pre-existing HTML template for your emails. This email should be created as a new Email Template. Furthermore, HTML elements within the template can use special mark up to identify which HTML sections are editable and which are not.
The widget menu contains various email widgets that you can drag-and-drop onto the design canvas.
The easiest way to get started is to use one of the pre-built templates and then experiment with the widgets.
When moving the mouse over the canvas a blue box will highlight widgets. To select the highlighted widget click on the widget. When the widget is selected it is outlined and a contextual toolbar is shown on the top right of the widget:
There are multiple types of widgets in the designer that may be selected. In the above example, a button container widget is selected. You can also select the individual button in the container.
To add a widget drag-and-drop it from the widgets menu on the right.
When a widget is dragged on to the design canvas the parent widget where the widget is placed is highlighted in yellow and a green bar indicates where the widget will be placed.
To remove a widget, select it on the canvas and then click on the trash can.
Once you select a widget on the canvas, you'll notice three tabs for most widgets on the right hand side:
The Style tab is used to set style details about the selected widget. These options will change based on the type of widget selected.
Some style values, such as Min and Max height and width are not supported by Microsoft Outlook.
An email is built using rows to control the layout and then content widgets are drag-and-dropped to determine how content is displayed.
You can now insert personalization tokens directly into your email content. Once you click on a text box to edit, you'll see the option to select Personalization tokens to add:
We now offer an easy way to add emojis to the body of your email, without having to copy/paste! In the email designer, after selecting a text box, you'll see the 😀 emoji:
After clicking on the emoji symbol, a pop will appear, and you can select any emoji of your choice.
For more advanced email layouts, you'll need to familiarize yourself with columns.
You have the option for 1, 2 and 3 column content and these are dragged-and-dropped on to the design canvas. In the screenshot below, 3 columns are added to the design canvas. Each row can have separate backgrounds, padding, and other settings.
A row displays the text "Please add content" as a target where other widgets are dragged-and-dropped onto the canvas. You can see the below where an image, text and button widget were added:
