How your branding reaches your website

Three things about a newsletter site are yours to set: a logo, one colour and one of ten font pairings. All three live in Settings, then Branding, and they reach your public website, your subscribe form, your social cards and every issue you send.

There is nothing else to configure, and that is the deal. Issue Mint has no theme picker, no templates and no custom CSS, which is why the archive website stays quick and readable everywhere without you thinking about it.

Your logo

Upload a PNG, JPG or SVG under 2 MB, and Issue Mint stores a cleaned copy of it scaled to no more than 800 pixels on either side.

The logo sits at the top of every page on your site, up to 200 pixels wide and 64 tall, linked back to your home page. It also appears in the header of every issue you send, at 160 by 48, on your social cards, and as the icon a phone uses when somebody saves your site to their home screen. Raster images are re-encoded from their pixels rather than stored as uploaded, and SVGs are run through a sanitiser that strips scripts and external references, because an SVG renders inline on a public page.

If you have no logo, your newsletter’s name is set in your heading typeface in the same place, which looks deliberate rather than empty.

Your colour

One six-digit hex colour, picked or typed, for example #0FA47A. It is the accent on everything.

Your colour draws links, the subscribe button, the tint behind a confirmation message, the Sponsored label on a sponsored item, the rounded square behind your initial in the favicon, and the rule down the left edge of every social card. The branding form checks it as you set it and warns you when contrast against white falls below 3 to 1, because that is the point at which your own links and buttons get hard to read.

Everything else on the page is fixed: warm off-white paper, near-black text, and hairline rules between issues.

The ten font pairings

Type is a choice between ten pairings rather than a font picker. Each one sets a heading face and a body face together.

The pairings are Editorial, Classic, Modern, Warm, Technical, Literary, Neutral, Newsprint, Friendly and Sharp, and the picker sets each one’s heading face in itself, so you are choosing between shapes rather than between names. Ten good pairings beat a list of a thousand families, most of which read badly at length.

The faces load from Bunny Fonts, a privacy-preserving mirror of Google Fonts, so your readers’ browsers make no connection to Google. Each pairing also carries a web-safe fallback stack, which is what email clients that refuse webfonts fall back to, and what a browser shows for the moment before the real face arrives.

The favicon is generated for you

Your site’s favicon is your newsletter’s first letter, in white, on a rounded square of your brand colour, served from /favicon.svg.

Issue Mint generates it rather than asking for an upload because a wordmark is unreadable at 16 pixels. Browsers hold on to a favicon for a day, so a colour change can take that long to show up in a tab you already have open.

What the site looks like, and does not

A newsletter site is one column about 640 pixels wide, body text at 17 pixels, and one accent colour. That is the whole design, on every page.

There is no theme picker, no layout chooser, no dark mode, no ability to reorder or hide sections of a page, no code injection and no stylesheet field. The trade is that every archive built on it loads fast, reads well on a phone, and keeps working when we improve the underlying pages. If a page builder is what you want, the honest answer is that Issue Mint is the wrong tool and always will be.

Where else your branding turns up

Saving branding changes more than your website. Your logo, colour and typeface are used in every issue you send, on the confirm and unsubscribe pages readers land on, on your social cards, and on the embeddable subscribe form you put on other sites.