Well, Reader, what you're reading right now is going to be the last issue of the Dispatch for 2021.

Before I get in to the content I have to share with you today, I just want to say a big thank you to you for subscribing to this lil newsletter. It means a lot to me that you read what I write, and that you're interested in my thoughts on marketing design and the things I'm working on. I read every single reply I get on these emails, and appreciate every single one of them!

Okay, on to the thoughts I want to leave you with until the new year...

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My top 3 takeaways from Inside Marketing Design

Reflection and distilling information is an important part of getting value from any educational content you watch, read or listen to. It’s not enough simply to consume it; you have to ask yourself “what am I taking away from this?” if you want to truly learn from it.

So, this is what I do at the end of each season of Inside Marketing Design. Because as much as I’m recording these interviews for you all to learn from, they’re a big opportunity for me to learn from my peers in the industry too. I mean, you saw the lineup of heavy hitters from this season right?? So much talent and so many insights into some of the top tech companies.

​Episode 12 is out now as a chatty recap where I breakdown things I learned and favorite insights from the season, but right here I'll briefly share with you my top 3 takeaways:

1. Treat your marketing website as a product – I've spent so long intentionally not being a product designer that I've been missing out on the value some product design processes could bring to my web design work. Hearing from Cory from Notion and Matt from HelpScout really helped me to see this and inspired me to lean more into systems-thinking for the ConvertKit marketing site.
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2. Put structure around ensuring consistency in your brand – The See, Buy, Use end-to-end branding approach that I learned about from Liz at Dropbox really blew my mind and helped me cut through the overwhelm of all of the work that needs to be done on improving the ConvertKit brand. When you group things into 3 buckets that reflect the users buying journey, it creates clarity and focus and I'm going to be applying this going forward.
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3. Don't be afraid to offer up self-service options – Every brand and marketing designer feels nervous about this, but if you have the right guidelines in place and an easy way to oversee the output you can save time by letting marketing partners create their own assets while still maintaining quality standards. This came up in several episodes, but I really like the sound of the brand asset review Slack channel Damien and Remilla at Figma talked about that gives an easy way for the non-designers grabbing things from their sticker sheets and style guides to share things for approval. Might be time for me to loosen the reigns a little and make use of something like this!

Check out more of my learnings, as well as some from other listeners of the show in the final episode of Season 2 below.

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A new scoring system for color contrast accessibility guidelines

If you watched my livestream a couple of weeks ago as I worked on refining the ConvertKit brand color palette, you will have seen me struggle with WCAG 2 color contrast checkers. I’m sure many of you have had the same issue!

Well, a new and improved algorithm will be used in WCAG 3 to measure color contrast. Dan Hollick breaks it down really well in this tweet thread, so click through to check it out and get up to speed.

Dan Hollick 🇿🇦 @DanHollick WCAG 3 will use a new color contrast method called APCA (Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm). It's a big improvement over the current system but there are a lot of changes to get your head around. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/yLbujn3hG4 December 9th 2021 1,518 Retweets 4,680 Likes

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Tomorrow I’m starting my journey to NZ to spend some time with my family after 2 long years apart. NZ has strict border control rules still, and when I arrive I have to spend a week in a government-managed isolation facility (they’re using a few hotels around the country for this).

I’m going to be daily-vlogging the experience, partly to give me something to do while I’m stuck inside a hotel room, and partly because I think it’ll be a pretty interesting snapshot in time to look back on. The vlogs will be going up daily on my YouTube channel so subscribe to follow along with the experience!

Hopefully I’ll see you in the comments over there, but if not I’ll see you right here in your inbox in 2022.

Happy holidays and happy new year,

Charli