The oldest part of the stack.

The studio's emails grew up this week. The waitlist confirmation and the contact-form relay used to be plain text; now they arrive in the same canvas, ink, and horizon gradient as the site.

Email HTML is a time capsule. Tables for layout, styles inlined on every element, a solid colour waiting behind every gradient for the clients that refuse to draw one. Nothing we lean on day to day survives the trip — no components, no shared tokens, not even the fonts. You write like it's 2004 and test like it's now.

It turned out to be a useful exercise in restraint. If the design only holds together with the gradient stripped and the typefaces swapped for whatever the mail client has, the identity is carrying its own weight. Ours held. That felt worth writing down.