Who is “The Dailyist”?
The Dailyist is a newsletter focused blog for the USA market, focusing their content on bringing value in the worlds of Home, Travel and Wealth for an audience from 25 to 45 years old. It is created to be an unpolarising, peaceful, morning coffee type of blog, that would be read in households across the US.
Visual Identity design: “The Whys”, “Whats” and “Hows”
First, a little bit on the “why” behind the brand. If you are planning your next adventure, or looking to transform your living space or home budget, The Dailyist has expertly crafted advice on how to do so. The motto of The Dailyist is: “Stay informed, stay inspired, and make every day an extraordinary day”.
Since The Dailyist is a blog/newsletter focused on family activities, the visual identity had to reflect that part of their brand. It is why we used colours that are warm, such as Salmon orange, Beige, hopeful, such as Navy blue with a feel of deep sea exploration and peaceful such as the colour of a peaceful sky over a sunset – light pastel blue.
Designing the Logo: The House of the Rising Sun?
The logo had to reflect a peaceful morning routine, as well as a reputable, classy source. It had to be completely unpolarised and focused on bringing a dash of serenity into your daily routine.
After that strategic brand talk with the client, we decided on the main brand mental image: Reading your newsletter peacefully with the sunset while still in your home. With that in mind, we have used a shape a rising sun behind the shape of a house, and modified a beautiful font called “Classy Vogue” to complement the symbol.
Website design process
The website’s goal: The readers need to feel comfortable first, ensured by a composition of complementing colours, shapes, typography, and illustrations. It should be an experience they can “take in” with a cup of morning coffee.
We have designed the content to be big and bold and we only introduced a few items at once. This is purposely opposed to big news brands that put the numbers of the content up front and center.
Newsletter design process
Next on the design list was the main piece of the readership puzzle: The Dailyist newsletter.
The newsletter offers fresh articles into the readers inbox daily. It is estimated that Approximately 97% of Americans check their email at least once daily, with 56% doing so three or more times per day. Additionally, 90% of Americans are subscribed to at least one email newsletter, and 74% receive newsletters from between one and ten entities.
Testing the waters first: The Dailyist focus, and their biggest “bet” for the incoming traffic was the newsletter itself. This meant we had to try and test a few examples first to get the best results as well.
The readers need to be focused first and foremost at the interesting daily trivia question, and secondly on the bigger heading article that is position right below it. Apart from the trivia question and the main article, 5 more articles were included, along with a sponsored article.
Before this design, a few designs were suggested, including a very simplified design without images, a design without trivia, etc. However, the final one would be used after AB testing the newsletter first on the newsletter subscriber base.
Website development with Webflow
For the website development, we have chosen Webflow, because of it’s powerful customisability options that allowed us to develop the website exactly how it looked in the Figma design.
The website has been developed to be responsive, with a big focus on UX, with small details such as a scroll-hidden banner, auto subscription popup that opens only after the nth visit if the user is not subscribed, etc. That was all done with a little help of JavaScript snippets that we generated with AI.
The Webflow CMS has helped us make the editing more accessible for the writers and editors. We designed fields and options in a logical order that writers would intuitively understand, such as Featured image, Content, Trivia question, Trivia link, Captions, etc.
We have connected the Webflow site to Google Analytics and have implemented a few specific snippets that would help us understand if the user has opened the site in the previous few days, and allow us to show them the popup.
Results
The Dailyist newsletter was an easy sell, resulting in hundreds of organic subscribers through the months. It also had a big click rate in the very beginning. The reading time was also pretty generous, and without going into details, the reception has been more than great.
Now that the project is all done, we are happy to have collaborated with The Dailyist and are always happy to see it in our inbox as well.
Let us know if you would like us to design something similar for you at hello@wayzux.com
