Behind the Scenes: Designing a Brand Launch Email with Flodesk Studio

For the past two months, I've been building Archive, a private digital reading room for my Muses & Sirens letters and the larger body of artwork and writing surrounding them.

It’s essentially the subscriber home for my private correspondence—a collection of lyrical letters on embodiment, desire, ritual, grief, love, art, and the wild and holy mystery of the feminine, all preserved on my own domain rather than housed inside a newsletter platform such as Substack or Beehiiv.

By the time the platform was ready to launch, I’d made hundreds of technical and design decisions about typography, imagery, pacing, sound, navigation, and the emotional atmosphere of the reading experience. I was meticulous about every decision, so the launch email couldn't feel detached from that world. It needed to carry the same visual language and sense of intention before a reader ever crossed into Archive itself.

That made Archive a natural first project for testing Flodesk Studio, Flodesk’s new email-design app.

Studio is built around a simple premise: describe the email you want, give it your brand identity, and allow the platform to create a thoughtfully designed starting point. The underlying system was created by human designers, accelerated by AI, and placed back into your hands to refine. It’s currently free while in beta, and finished emails can be sent through Flodesk or exported to another email provider that supports HTML.

Instead of experimenting with a fictional campaign, I decided to use a real one: the launch email for Archive. It was already a piece I cared deeply about, which made it the perfect opportunity to explore how Studio fit into my creative process.

Building the Brand Foundation

Studio begins by asking you to establish the visual and editorial world it will be working within.

I selected "Add my own brand," then entered the foundational pieces of Muse by Midnight: my logo, website, brand description, colors, fonts, voice, and brand artwork.

If you've experimented with AI-assisted creative tools before, the overall flow will probably feel familiar. I shared the foundations of my brand—its aesthetics, voice, colors, typography, and personality—so the platform had context before it began designing.

Then, I entered my aesthetic direction and described Muse by Midnight as a “multidimensional platform devoted to feminine power, emotional alchemy, mysticism, embodiment, and sensual self-expression.”

I then added a prompt describing the Archive launch email I wanted to create.

Within moments, Studio generated three different email directions.

From Prompt to Prototype

Each template had a different visual logic. One felt more editorial and image-led, while another used a modular grid. A third template was simple and mostly text-based.

This aspect of Studio showed the most promise (and usefulness) for me because it could accelerate early design conversations while still allowing room for creative decisions.

My first prompt did not produce an email that sounded exactly like me, but I wasn’t surprised. A voice and perspective developed over years of writing and training cannot be compressed into a few onboarding fields and one prompt.

However, from a design perspective, Studio did provide three visually developed starting points informed by my colors, typography, imagery, and creative direction. From there, I could build upon that foundation and decide what needed refinement.

Where Studio Saved Me Time

For me, the most valuable feature is speed.

Ordinarily, creating an email like this requires a long sequence of small decisions before the real work even begins:

• Which template should I use?
• Should the opening be image-led or text-led?
• Where should the first call to action appear?

Studio answered those questions with options that kept the brand visible throughout the process. My colors, fonts, logo, and imagery were not afterthoughts added at the end. They were part of the environment from the beginning, which is an important distinction.

The Human Part

After experimenting, I ultimately moved into my usual Flodesk workflow to complete the launch email.

Part of that decision was practical: I already knew the existing builder, and the launch date was close. I could finish more quickly in an environment I’d used for years rather than learning every part of Studio during a live project.

I also wanted to spend more time with the writing. As a writer, language is not packaging simply added after the design. I consistently revise the rhythm, punctuation, and section order until the email has a natural cadence and flow.

During this first experience, I’d probably rate the brand setup, visual exploration, and layout direction as the most useful features of Studio.

With more time, I’d like to explore the manual builder—especially the chat-based refinements—with more depth. Studio is still in beta, and Flodesk is actively shipping new features, which matters when evaluating it. It’s still an evolving creative environment, not a finished product.

Does It Look and Sound Like You?

Visually (and design-wise), it can get close—especially when you give it a clear brand foundation.

Verbally, though, I think the answer depends on what you expect. While a prompt can communicate tone, subject, and structure, it can’t instantly surmise the full breadth of a writer’s voice. Writing is also the part of the process that I most enjoy, so I don’t think that would be an area that I outsource anyway—especially for Archive, which is a literary project dependent on my voice and editorial sensibilities.

On a related note, I do appreciate the openness and disclosure from Flodesk around how AI is integrated into this product.

Per Flodesk:

"Our design team hand-crafted thousands of individual component pieces—layouts, blocks, typography, palettes.

The AI’s job is to assemble those human-designed pieces based on your prompt and apply your brand and voice. It’s expediting the process, not generating generic design. If it feels like a designer touched it, it’s because one did."

It's intelligently orchestrating an extensive library of human-designed components based on what the creator needs.

I also appreciate the transparency around data training, which was my number one question before I agreed to try Studio.

According to Flodesk:

"Studio is trained on our human design team’s work—not your Flodesk account or your subscriber data. Studio and Flodesk.com are separate platforms, and your data is never shared back to train AI models."

The Larger Creative Question

Using Studio while launching Archive made me think about where technology belongs inside a creative practice. I don’t think that every difficult or time-consuming part of "creating" should be automated. Within the difficulty is where discernment, individual style, and taste are often formed.

However, there’s a difference between carefully writing a sentence and staring at an empty email layout because you can’t decide where the image should go.

I think the more useful creative tools should help us protect our energy for the decisions that require us, and during this first experiment, Studio did offer that by providing a strong starting point.

I still wrote, edited, and rearranged the email, but Studio shortened the distance between the initial concept and the first visible possibilities.

Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised and look forward to seeing how the product evolves.

Try it for yourself at Studio.flodesk.com

Flodesk Studio is free while in beta. I am a Flodesk partner, and this post was created as part of a sponsored partner campaign. All observations and opinions are my own.