One weekly email, on my terms.
I replaced a dozen noisy newsletters with one I designed for myself. It arrives at a predictable time, with only what deserves my attention.
- Type
- Personal project
- Status
- Live, weekly
- Role
- Designer, editor, builder
- Built with
- HTML email · Next.js · AI agents
The problem
Not too little information. Too scattered.
A good source earns a subscription once, then its emails drift into noise: arriving at random times, repeating themselves and ignoring how my circumstances change. The cost is attention, not access.
The idea
A delivery day for information.
One predictable email every Monday morning, holding the important developments, useful opportunities and interesting possibilities that genuinely deserve a place.
What the pilots taught me
Good recommendations weren’t enough. It needed to behave like a product.
- A stable, recognisable visual identity
- Direct, usable links
- A strong information hierarchy
- Editorial memory across editions
- Rules for novelty, repetition and recurring events
A mid-pilot redesign made the point: when ordinary content updates reshape the whole email, the reader loses their bearings. So the approved design became a fixed template, and everything else was split into files with a single job each.
How it works
An editorial system, not a search result
Reader profile
Who it’s for: interests, goals, circumstances and dislikes.
Editorial policy
What earns space, and how prominently.
Edition history
Memory: what already ran, what changed, what to retire.
Design system
One canonical template, so content changes never reshape the email.
Feedback companion
A quick weekly form whose answers shape the next edition.
The loop closes each week: feedback updates the profile and history, and the next edition is built from them. Privacy by design: no tracking pixels, no tracked links, and no third-party mailing-list sign-ups.
EXP-005 · Prototype
The feedback form, in every state
Use the state bar to switch between ready, in progress, saving, submitted and error.
Draft case study. A fuller write-up covering process, iterations and results is coming.