The Vancouver Club is a historic private members' club, and its email needed to feel as considered as the club itself. It also had to work for a small in-house team sending for the main club and several sub-clubs. We built a complete email design system and master template in Denada, then documented it and taught the team how to use it.
The system starts from brand tokens: the club's colour palette (DeepGreen, RoyalPurple and Dark tones, with an Ivory surface) and its type stacks, set once in the library theme so every block inherits them. Every block works on three surfaces: Light, Ivory and Dark. Dark is designed as its own surface, not left to the inbox to invert, so buttons, text and the crest stay legible in dark-mode clients. Logos swap automatically in dark mode.
The master template has 48 hand-coded blocks in 10 categories, including Headers, Heroes, Body, Events, Cards, Banners, Agenda Items and Footers. Each block is a small set of decisions rather than a fixed picture: a theme, a brand tone with spacing, and content slots for eyebrow, headline, button and retina images. That is how 48 blocks cover hundreds of real emails.
The sub-clubs share the system without breaking it. The Grand Crew Wine Club, the Highlanders Whisky Club, Vancouver Club Cycling and the Swim Team each get their own header in light and dark versions: the crest changes, the system doesn't.
The Figma design system that mirrors the coded library is in progress. It will give designers the same blocks, tokens and dark-mode surfaces the team already builds with.
Logo
