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🔴 Newsletter design is about strong opinions

🔴 Newsletter design is about strong opinions

One year of Today in Design, ft. creator Cole Derochie

Francis Zierer
August 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.

Today’s guest is Cole Derochie, a professional product designer (he’s worked across basically every design discipline in his career) who also happens to run one of the best-designed newsletters out there: Today in Design.

In this issue:

💰️ How much revenue the newsletter generated this first year
📈 Gaining 5.4k subscribers through organic Twitter growth
🎨 Cole’s advice on newsletter design

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Cole or watch it on YouTube.

A great aggregation product requires great packaging

“I remember the first things I was designing at design school, and they were embarrassingly bad. There's this delta — you can have good taste but you might not have the skillset or expertise to realize that level of taste.”

One year ago, on August 15, 2023, Cole Derochie sent out the first issue of Today in Design. In this first year he published 240 issues of the weekdaily newsletter, only missing around 20 weekdays (he never publishes on weekends).

When I started writing Creator Spotlight in January, I asked a few people to share the best-designed newsletters they knew. Today in Design came up thrice. See for yourself: here’s a recent issue. I’ve been following it ever since, which I just share to say, I’ve never actually noticed it missing a day; the industry best practice is to set a schedule and never deviate, but for a personal passion project like this … you can skip a beat.

Today in Design has a rare-for-newsletter black-dominant color scheme. The design is clean but highly customized — for example, it’s on beehiiv, but Cole opens for a custom-designed Tally poll over beehiiv’s built-in poll feature.

Today in Design is exactly what it sounds like: the day’s design news, aggregated. It’s “more of a hobby right now” than a business, Cole says, but it’s a dialed format with plenty of potential to become a real business; the well-polished visual template elevates a largely commentary-free aggregation product into something worth opening every day. Like any good aggregation newsletter, you can scan and fully consume a whole issue in less than 30 seconds or settle in and actually click into some of the linked items.

There are, people are saying, too many aggregation newsletters. It’s arguably the easiest type of newsletter to write; everyone who spends too much time online has a list of sources they check every day, and compiling a handful of your favorite links once each week or day takes little extra time when you’re already consuming the content.

Cole’s newsletter works because it looks great. If it were just the same links but in a bulleted list format instead of a beautifully designed structure, I’m not sure anyone would’ve recommended that I check it out. This isn’t to say that Cole’s curation alone isn’t compelling — it is, but a design newsletter needs to have a striking point of view. The audience trusts Cole’s curation all the more because of the packaging.

Organic growth builds strong bones

Cole only had around 600 Twitter followers when he started Today in Design and says “engagement was almost nothing.” In February, 6 months into working on the newsletter, he broke 5,000. A “big part of starting [the newsletter] was to build that up,” which has certainly worked: today, one year in, the count is over 7,600.

It’s unclear how many of these followers also subscribe to the newsletter, but Cole says Twitter has driven the vast majority of his growth; it’s a productive system. A few days before the publication of this newsletter, Cole shared a subscriber count of 5,435 — when I interviewed him three weeks earlier, he was at 4,995; growth is picking up.

“So, 5,000 [subscribers] is 100% organic. And the biggest driver has been sharing those ‘bento’ videos [on Twitter], that are just quick snapshots of what you can expect in the feature.

There's an element of social network effects in it, that I post this video of content, a quick preview, and then the next comment is [tagging] everyone that's on Twitter in that post.”

A recent ‘bento’ video taken from Cole’s Twitter

An organic audience means, generally, and certainly in this case, high engagement. The newsletter audience is currently over 5,400, with an open rate of 60% and a clickthrough rate of 18%.

Cole says he spends “under an hour” on each newsletter nowadays, in the mornings, but that he used to stay up “sometimes until two in the morning” working on it. Now he gets up at five in the morning. He’s employed full-time — a co-founder and Head of Product at GigHound, he also takes on occasional freelance work — plus he has a small child; he had to find a way to bend the newsletter into his schedule.

It’s just Cole working on the newsletter. He’s never had outside help and is unsure how he’d scale the concept:

“I'm kind of approaching this point where I need to lock in, decide whether this is it, or do I want to invest in expanding it a little bit?”

Outside of any particular format scaling would take, Cole’s main concern is scaling the content selection process — scaling his taste. At the start, he’d open up all his bookmarked sources every day and scour for interesting items. By now, he’s compiled various RSS feeds into his Feedly to save time, and he has a Twitter bookmarks folder he fills throughout the day to revisit for the next morning’s issue. It’s “100%” his taste, but he tries to maintain some level of objectivity:

“It's difficult, but maybe [any given item] is not necessarily something that I would be super interested in because I already know what this article is about, but it’s something I wish I would have known five years ago and it might be helpful to a younger designer who's a subscriber. So I’m just trying to keep that sort of lens on.”

"I’m spending more time in the business than on the business”

Cole stresses that, for now, Today in Design is still a hobby. It’s a small part of his day, a way of putting a point on the time he spends online. But he’s given at minimum 300 hours to it so far, and it has generated revenue of over $7,000.

Like so many great newsletter, this is a passion project built to fill a market gap. There was no one design news outlet Cole loved most:

“If I had to say like the best place, like single source to get stuff, it would be Twitter, but there's just so much noise on there that it's hard to wade through. And so if I can save people, you know, if they're not online or they're not on Threads or anything for a week, I can still keep them up to date with like what I think are the most important, most relevant things people are talking about.”

It’s a well-packaged business digest. That is what makes Today in Design stand out from other aggregation newsletters. Cole translates at least an hour of daily browsing into a concentrated, 30-second skim. And it’s not just about whatever Cole is into at the moment. He aspires to truly serve the design community, or at least a particular design community.

What kind of community does Cole aspire to build? What kind of designer does he hope Today in Design, as it scales, will attract and even propagate?

“I just want to lead by example that sharing and celebrating people in our space is a good thing and you don't need to tear someone else's work down to feel better about yourself.

And maybe that's a bit of a reflection on younger Cole who, you know, wanted to go work in Silicon Valley and be like Jony Ive and had this aura of immaturity, right? I felt I needed to really nitpick things.

Whereas now, I don't think that's necessarily helpful. I think you can critique and give feedback on people's things to make it better, but do it in a way that is like a companion, not someone who's competing.”

Connect with Cole on Twitter/X.
Read and subscribe to Today in Design.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

🎙️ I spoke to Cole for nearly an hour. Only some of what we talked about fits in this newsletter. In the full conversation —

📽️ Cole traces his unusual path into the design business
🧬 How the newsletter has evolved over the past year
⏳️ Cole walks us through his full production process

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

We obviously had to get Cole’s advice on newsletter design

“I'm still trying to figure this out because email is so restrictive in what you can do with it. And some would argue that the decisions I've made are terrible for newsletter design. GIFs, it's dark instead of white. Like, some email clients don't love that.

To answer your question, I do think [the best thing is] if you have a partner or the means to hire someone to create a brand, a visually distinct experience, for your readers, because in the inbox, every email looks the exact same — just text.

And in my research of looking at things that had done well, like Milk Road being a crypto email, that's a very opinionated design that works very well for them as a brand.

If you can think about it [as creating a cohesive, opinionated brand], that would be what I would suggest.”

Don’t overthink newsletter design; the fluff erodes over time

Early on, each issue of Today in Design had a written-out intro and Cole’s commentary included on most links. Today, the product is more image-driven, less text-driven. It’s become lean. This is partially a matter of intent and partially a matter of necessity — Cole needed to spend less time on it, so he stopped doing extra bits that took too much time.

With a newsletter — with any sustained project, really — plans begin to fail. The point is to have an opinionated, intentional plan in the first place, then adapt once in motion. Is it worth a few extra hours of your week to write a specific section in your newsletter that gives you a headache? Or will your life — and your readers’ experience with the newsletter — work better without? You have to recognize and make these decisions.

Creator Spotlight, for example, has changed in the 8 months I’ve been writing it. Look at my first issue. There used to be a “Zoom Out” section where I’d sum up 3–5 key points from each newsletter. I stopped because it began to feel overly repetitive; I didn’t feel it was doing a great service to you, the reader. Know when to cut.

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, our weekly podcast co-hosted by Spotlight editor Francis and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.
- This week: Casey Lewis, former Spotlight guest, joins us to chat: the blurred line between amateur and professional writing online, “aesthetic” culture, her new podcast, and Tumblr’s lack of monetizability compared to new platforms.
We recently profiled another creator working in the (UX) design space, Peter Ramsey of Built for Mars. It’s a good one — read it here.

Thank you for reading. For more, check out Cole’s episode of our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Theo Lloyd-Hughes, an independent journalist covering women’s soccer in the United States. We’re covering

And if you missed last week’s issue about Sean Devlin and Nice News, a positive-news-only daily newsletter that’s gone from 0 to 820k subscribers in 3 years, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn
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