The card people see when your issue is shared

Issue Mint renders a branded preview card, 1200 by 630 pixels, for each issue you send and one for the newsletter as a whole. That card is what appears when somebody pastes a link to your issue into Slack, a group chat or a social network, and it is built from your logo, your colour and your typeface rather than from a screenshot.

Nothing about this needs setting up, and there is nothing in the composer to remember. Sending an issue is what produces its card, and a shared link that looks like your newsletter rather than like a bare URL is part of what makes a hosted archive website worth having.

What is on the card

An issue’s card carries a rule in your brand colour down the left edge, your logo and newsletter name across the top, “Issue #12” in your colour, the subject line as the headline, the date it went out on the bottom left, and your site’s own hostname on the bottom right.

The subject is set at one of three sizes depending on how long it is, and clamped to three lines, so a long subject comes out smaller rather than cut off mid-word. If you have no logo, your newsletter’s initial appears in a rounded square of your colour instead. The card for the newsletter itself is the same design with your description as the headline, trimmed to 140 characters, and your publishing schedule where the date would be.

When a card is generated

An issue’s card is built when the send finishes, on a background queue, because the date printed on it has to be real. The newsletter’s own card is built when you save branding.

Issue Mint hashes everything that shows up in the picture, which for an issue means its number, its subject, the date it went out and your branding. When the hash matches what is already stored, no card is rendered at all, so editing an issue’s preheader or re-saving a settings page does not quietly redraw anything. There is more on what else happens at the end of a send in publishing an issue.

What happens after you change your branding

Saving branding regenerates two cards: the one for your site and the one for your most recently sent issue.

Cards for older issues keep the colour and typeface they were made with. That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight, because repainting a hundred-issue archive is a hundred renders to change pictures almost nobody will look at again, and it is not a decision worth making automatically. There is no button in the dashboard that does it, so if a rebrand genuinely needs the back catalogue redrawn, ask us. How your branding reaches your website covers the three things a change can affect.

When there is no card

A page on a newsletter site always has a preview picture. Issue Mint works down a chain: the issue’s own card, then the newsletter’s card, then your logo, then an Issue Mint default.

That chain is why card rendering is allowed to fail quietly. A render that goes wrong is logged on our side and never surfaces as a broken page or a failed send. Worth knowing about the fallbacks: the preview size a page advertises is the card’s, 1200 by 630, so a logo standing in for a card will not match the shape it is announced with and some apps will letterbox or crop it. A newsletter with a card of its own looks right everywhere, which is the argument for saving your branding once even if you keep the defaults.

Where the cards are served from

Cards are downloaded once and kept on Issue Mint’s own storage, alongside your logo. The pages never link to the renderer that drew them.

That matters over the long run rather than today: a link to an issue from three years ago still resolves to a picture we control, nothing your readers fetch goes to a third party, and a card can be replaced or purged without touching the page it sits on.

What you cannot change

There is one card design, and it takes your branding and nothing else.

There is no template chooser, no way to upload a card for an individual issue, no control over the crop or the text on it, and no per-issue toggle to suppress the preview. The tags around it are fixed too: your title, your description, and a large image card for the networks that ask which shape to use. If you want a different picture in front of a particular link, the practical lever is the subject line, since that is the headline the card prints. Everything the pages declare about themselves is set out in how a newsletter site presents itself to search engines.