Subject Matter Expert: Email Design

Once a year, UAH’s Office of Strategic Communications hosts a marketing workshop called Charged Up. It provides marketing employees across the university the opportunity to come together to learn from subject matter experts and each other. In 2024 I was asked to give a presentation on the principles and best practices of email design for marketing purposes.

I enjoy giving these presentations. Classroom-like in their atmosphere, they give me the opportunity to flex my old teaching muscles. My presentation covered a range of design topics including the neurology of reading and cognitive processing, best layouts for mobile responsivity, purposes and strategies for image use, and disability accessibility. In an anonymous survey afterward, attendees commented on my presentation:

Dave made good points about the way we read layouts and the importance of creating a sense of delight and/or surprise.

I enjoyed the email session towards the end of the day. I could have listened to that speaker all day!

One thing that stuck with me was how to build better layouts, how people read through emails, visualization.

Sample Presentation Slides

Subject Matter Expert: Web Photography

Attendee feedback from 2024’s Charged Up workshop had a common theme: make the sessions interactive—more activity and less lecture. I volunteered to give a presentation on web photography, specifically, how to take the best possible photographs with a cell phone in case the university photographer is unavailable on the day of their event.

I invited the university photographer to begin the session by telling the story of one of his favorite photos in order to give the audience some insight into what a professional photographer does when he takes a picture: how he approached the subjects, how he took the shot, what he thought about before, during, and after, etc. Drawing heavily on my experience as a public school teacher, I designed a “lesson” consisting of a short lecture on the basic principles of photography and an anonymous activity that encouraged the audience to think critically about the act of taking cell phone photographs, share their own photographs with each other, and participate in a gentle, round-robin critique session using a rubric I created to evaluate those photos.