Your logo, colour and type

Settings, then Branding, holds three choices: a logo, one primary colour and one font pairing. They are used on your website, on your subscribe form, on your social cards and in every issue you send.

All three have working defaults, so branding is never the thing holding up a first issue. Until you change them a newsletter is green (#0FA47A) and set in the Editorial pairing, Fraunces over Inter.

The logo

Issue Mint accepts a PNG, a JPG or an SVG, up to 2 MB.

The file is used at the top of your website, sized to fit 200 by 64 pixels, and at the head of every issue Issue Mint sends for you at 160 by 48. It also goes on the confirmation email a new subscriber gets, on the icon iOS uses if somebody saves your site to their home screen, and stands in as your social image until a card has been generated for you.

There is no remove button. Uploading a new file replaces the old one, and the old one is deleted only once the replacement is safely stored, so an upload that fails leaves you with the logo you already had rather than none.

What happens to the file you upload

Nothing is stored as uploaded. Every logo is rebuilt before it is written, and what a reader sees is the rebuilt version.

A PNG or JPG is decoded and redrawn as a PNG, scaled down if it is longer than 800 pixels on its longest side, with transparency preserved. A file that cannot be decoded as an image is refused rather than stored.

An SVG is different, because an SVG is a document rather than a picture: it can carry scripts, event handlers and references to other people’s servers, and it renders inline on a public page. Issue Mint strips all three, including the remote references hidden in an href or a url() inside an inline style, which would otherwise hand every visitor’s address to whoever the file pointed at. An SVG that cannot be cleaned is not stored at all, and the upload fails rather than half working. Exporting the same mark as a PNG is the quickest way past that.

Your primary colour

The primary colour is one six-digit hex value, picked with the colour control or typed into the field beside it.

It draws the links and buttons on your website, the subscribe button on your embedded signup form, the accents in every issue you send, the tab icon Issue Mint generates from your newsletter’s initial, and the block of colour on your social cards. One colour is all there is: Issue Mint has no secondary or accent colour to set.

The contrast warning

Issue Mint measures your colour against white and warns you below a ratio of 3 to 1, showing the ratio it measured.

Your website and your issues are both set on white or near-white, so a pale colour is not a stylistic choice there, it is a link a reader cannot see. The warning is a nudge rather than a rule: Issue Mint saves the colour anyway, on the grounds that you can see your own site. Somewhere around a mid-tone of the colour you had in mind usually clears it, and a colour that reads well as a button on white reads well everywhere else Issue Mint puts it.

The font pairings

Ten pairings are offered, each one a face for headings and a face for reading text. Picking a pairing sets both, and there is no way to mix one heading face with another body face.

Pairing	Headings	Reading text
Editorial	Fraunces	Inter
Classic	Playfair Display	Source Sans 3
Modern	Space Grotesk	Inter
Warm	Bitter	Karla
Technical	IBM Plex Sans	IBM Plex Sans
Literary	Lora	Lato
Neutral	Manrope	Manrope
Newsprint	Libre Baskerville	Libre Franklin
Friendly	Nunito	Nunito Sans
Sharp	Archivo	Archivo

Ten good pairings beat a font picker, which is the reason for the short list. Each card in the picker is set in the fonts it is offering, so you are reading the choice rather than a list of names.

Your website loads these from Bunny Fonts, a mirror that serves the same faces without your readers touching Google. Email is the exception, because mail clients do not fetch webfonts: every pairing carries a web-safe fallback, Georgia for the serif faces and Helvetica or Arial for the sans, and that is what most inboxes will actually render. It is worth choosing a pairing you are happy to see fall back, and previewing an issue before you send is the quickest way to know.

What changes when you save

Your website, your archive and your subscribe form change immediately. Anything already delivered does not.

Saving branding also rebuilds two social cards: the one for your site, and the one for your most recently sent issue, which is the pair that actually gets shared. Older issues keep the cards they already have rather than a colour change quietly regenerating an archive of fifty of them. What is in somebody’s inbox stays as it was sent, in the colour and the type it went out in.

What branding does not cover

There is no custom CSS, no template editing and no uploading your own font files.

Layout, spacing and type sizes on your website and in your issues are fixed, and what you can change on your site is the honest list. Issue Mint has no dark version of either surface: the email declares itself as a light message and leaves inverting to the mail clients that insist on it, and the colours it uses are picked to survive that.