Challenge — Creative Freedom Meets Digital Constraints

The Medium Designs The Message

As the marketing automation team, we led the development of a campaign that announced the launch of this most recent Secret Menu edition to digital subscribers. Our objective was twofold. Of course, we wanted to unlock favorable channel metrics, especially with regard to read rate and click-through rate: indicators of how well content had been researched, timed, written, designed and targeted.

Secondly, though, and in this case, no less essentially, we hoped to create an email series that lived up to the powerful Secret Menu aesthetic that DoorDash and Studio Yukiko had worked so hard to cultivate.

But there was a problem. The unique patchwork of colors, typographies and art styles that leapt from the magazine page did not translate well to email: a medium where less is often more, where white space is treasured, and where classic visual hierarchies are often best for giving users an easy and intuitive way to process information.

Secret Menu, in other words, could afford to be designed boldly and wildly—could afford, as Lupton and Xia write in Extra Bold, to “protest” and “resist” the “deeply embedded norms” of design, which historically lean toward symmetry and ‘staticness’ and even predictability, via the use of “diagonal lines, mismatched fonts and montaged photos.”

Its digital campaign, however, could not afford this. Helvetica, with its iconic versatility, would be the font. Images would be simple and homogenous: purchased from Shutterstock, not painted or patterned in Photoshop as they’d been for web properties. And colors, far from the Art Deco pastels and Ocean Drive neons of the print booklet, would hew to our classic brand palette, which centered on DoorDash Red (#fb321e).

As we explained to stakeholders, this straight-laced approach was necessary for email for two reasons:

1. The digital campaign would be rooted in email content—which people can unsubscribe from and report as spam, damaging the sender reputation of DoorDash. Further, these emails would be following in the branded footsteps of the millions of emails that preceded them. Subscribers have expectations. And meeting those expectations—being “on-brand”—is important. It contributes to our brand recognition, the clarity of our message and even the trust consumers build with us across touchpoints.

2. The Secret Menu magazine, only the second of its kind at DoorDash, was comparatively unweighed by design precedent. And magazines have more space than emails, are more trusted, and in print are more stable upon delivery, unaffected by inboxes that can block images or devices in dark mode. As such, it is safer to experiment in magazines. If someone doesn’t like what they see, it is much harder for them to unsubscribe and there is no account manager or policing platform to report it to.

Accessibility

Our team was also concerned about accessibility. While stakeholders understandably were moved by the prospect of delivering emails as beautiful as the booklet, we had to step in and speak up for best practice—which, in this case, meant ensuring our content was legible for as many contacts as possible and adhered to WCAG 2 standards.

Some color combinations—though eye-catching in pull quotes, image shadows, background colorways and other accents—did not achieve the contrast ratio required for information to be considered accessible. Accessibility is about more than color combination! In our use case, though, it was the most pressing consideration to ensure text was readable.

The Design team had used greens, yellow, blues and pinks to evoke the skylines and seascapes of the Magic City. However, we in marketing must always remember our audience. Eight percent of men and 0.5% of women in the U.S. (where this campaign was focused) are affected by some form of color blindness, which would be about 20 million email users.¹

All of our palettes were reanalyzed.

On the pastel front, for example, Grape Green (#a1e5a1) and Sunset (#ffd699) and Peach Flesh (#ffc3a0)—evocative of the fruit festivals and tropical trees of Miami—had to be axed. The same was true for Sky Blue (#a2d6f9) and Light Pink (#ffb6c1) and Mauve (#d5aaff): While an homage to watercolor sunsets, these hues did not pass WCAG quality control.

A nod to South Beach and boat shows, the neon palette fared no better. Safety Orange (#ff5e00) and Neon Pink (#f535aa) when paired were unreadable for users with a visual impairment, as were Cyan (#00d4ff) and Psychedelic Purple (#d300ff).

Even the initial solution proposed by the Secret Menu team, backgrounds of DoorDash Red (#fb321e) with headers and quotes of Blush Pink (#f1acc9), could not be used, as they failed contrast checks for normal-size text, large text, graphical objects and user interface components.

Unexpectedly, this pulled a new thread, one much bigger than any individual campaign: the fact that DoorDash Red, a frequent background color in web, social and email marketing, did not meet accessibility standards when paired, simply, with the color white. This combination, which at the time was branded everywhere, is only accessible in specific contexts and is not accessible at all for normal-sized text.