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What Is a Design System in Brew?

Brew’s AI is taught to strike a balance between creativity and brand consistency. It analyzes your website to extract your brand elements, then creates a comprehensive design system you can fine-tune. This set of brand-specific building blocks becomes the foundation for all your email generation.

Automatic Extraction

Extract your complete design system from a website

Fine-Tune Control

Fine-tune every visual element to match your exact brand requirements

Instant On-Brand Emails

Generate consistent, on-brand emails with AI in less than a minute

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Getting Started with Design Systems

1

Access your design system

Navigate to the Design section in Brew to view and manage your design systems.

Your first design system is automatically created during sign-up based on your business website.

2

Create a new design system

Click the ”+ New Design” button to create a new design systems. You’ll need to:

  • Provide a descriptive name for your design system
  • Enter the URL of a website to extract styles from
  • Choose whether to make this your default design system

For best results, use your homepage URL and ensure it reflects your current branding. You can create multiple design systems for different campaigns, product lines, or audiences. This approach is particularly valuable during rebrands.

3

Review and fine-tune your design system

After creation, your design system is ready for review. You can:

  • Fine-tune any visual aspect to match your exact brand requirements
  • Preview how your emails will look across different clients and screen sizes
  • Make all changes apply automatically to future emails

For detailed control over specific elements, use the Manual Design Settings.

4

Create on brand emails with AI

Every email you generate with Brew’s AI automatically uses your selected design system, ensuring brand consistency across all communications.

New emails automatically use your default design system. To apply a different design system to an existing draft, you can make the change directly in the email editor.

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Manual Design Settings

While Brew automatically extracts and configures your design system, you can manually fine-tune every aspect to match your brand perfectly. The interface provides granular control over all visual elements:

Quick Compatibility Guide

Some design features have limited support across email clients. Look for the ⚠️ icon throughout these settings.

What works where:

Don’t worry! Brew automatically creates optimized fallbacks for all email clients. You control which features to use in your design settings or when creating emails.

Learn more about email client compatibility

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Understanding Email Clients

Email clients vary dramatically in their HTML and CSS support, creating unique challenges for email design. Brew’s AI automatically handles these inconsistencies for you, ensuring your emails look great everywhere without requiring any technical knowledge on your part.

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The Email Design Challenge

Different email clients use vastly different rendering engines and have different market shares (shown in parentheses below):

  • Apple Mail/iOS Mail (~53%): Uses WebKit rendering (excellent HTML5/CSS3 support)
  • Gmail (~30%): Uses its own rendering engine with limited CSS support
  • Outlook (~4%): Windows versions use Microsoft Word’s rendering engine (most limited support), while Outlook for Mac uses WebKit (much better support)
  • Other major clients (~10%): Yahoo Mail, Google Android, and Samsung Mail offer moderate support with varying capabilities
  • Regional and desktop clients (~3%): Thunderbird, Web.de, Orange.fr, and similar platforms typically provide basic to moderate CSS support

Apple Mail commands over 50% of global email opens, with Gmail accounting for approximately 30%. Combined with Outlook’s 4% share, these three clients represent over 85% of all email opens worldwide.

If you’re curious about which specific email features work in different email clients, the Can I Email database is a helpful resource that shows compatibility across Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and others.

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Brew’s Solution: Progressive Enhancement

Brew’s AI uses a technique called “progressive enhancement” to ensure emails look great in all email clients. Here’s how it works:

  1. Build a solid foundation: Every email starts with a baseline design that works in all clients
  2. Add enhancements where configured: Advanced features like hover effects, shadows, and custom fonts are only applied when you’ve added them to your design system, and only for email clients that support them
  3. Provide graceful fallbacks: When advanced features aren’t supported, simpler alternatives ensure your message still comes through clearly

While Brew optimizes for all major clients, test your emails with the clients most popular among your specific audience.

This systematic approach means you can confidently use advanced design features, knowing your emails will degrade gracefully and maintain their impact across the entire email client landscape.

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Need Help?

Our team is ready to support you at every step of your journey with Brew. Choose the option that works best for you:

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Click “Open in ChatGPT” at the top right of any page to analyze documentation with ChatGPT or Claude for deeper insights.