Beautiful typography, extendable with web fonts

Acorn uses the golden ratio for both desktop and mobile, in order to deliver content width-tailored typography that looks great and is easy to read. Just like you're used to from reading a book.

Golden ratio

Font size and line height are based on the maximum content width achievable with one column: 600px

Following the golden ratio formula for typography, we reset body text to a 16px font size, with a 25px line height. For mobile devices, the line height is reduced to 23px.

Native Font Stack

Acorn uses the same beautiful system font stack that you're used to from Bootstrap 4. Even in the absence of web fonts support, this helps create beautiful emails across the board, by taking advantage of the operating system's fonts.

In order to avoid unnecessary font-family automatic CSS inlining with most ESPs, Acorn takes advantage of conditional comments for Outlook, as well as @media queries, to cleverly define fonts so that your HTML is kept clean (and away from Gmails clipping limit) even after your ESP inlines the framework styles.

For Outlook & Windows 10 Mail:

<!--[if mso]>
...
<style>
  ...
  td,th,div,p,a,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {font-family:"Segoe UI",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;}
</style>
<![endif]-->

For any email client that supports @media queries:

@media  only screen {
  .col, td, th, div, p {font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI","Roboto","Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif;}
}

Google Fonts

For email clients that support web fonts, you can customise Acorn further with our Google Fonts technique.

In order to avoid Outlook's TNR bug ↗ and still keep our code short and clean, we import the web fonts in an @media query, and apply them after the native font stack reset. All clients that support web fonts also support media queries, but Outlook will just ignore it.

In this example, we import one webfont: a display font called 'Bangers', that we apply with the .display-font class. The rest of the text will use the native font stack, but the paragraph on the lower right will use the system's monospace font: being defined inline, it overrides the default font family:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" role="presentation" width="100%">
  <tr>
    <td style="padding: 0 24px;">
      <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" role="presentation" width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td class="col" align="center" width="100%" style="padding: 0 8px;">
            <h1 class="display-font" style="color: #3FB58B; margin-bottom: 10px; line-height: 100%;">My two natures had memory in common</h1>
            <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 14px;">- the heading above is using a display font from Google Fonts -</span>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
      <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" role="presentation" width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td class="divider" style="padding: 32px 16px;">
            <div style="background: #EEEEEE; height: 1px; line-height: 1px;">‌</div>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
      <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" role="presentation" width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td class="col" width="260" style="padding: 0 8px;">
            <h2 style="font-weight: 500; margin: 0;">Native font</h2>
            <p style="color: #555555;">The heading above uses your computer's pre-installed fonts. Just like this text.</p>
          </td>
          <td class="col" width="260" style="padding: 0 8px;">
            <h2 style="font-weight: 300; margin: 0;">Various weights</h2>
            <p style="color: #555555; font-family: monospace; font-weight: 300;">Override the default font stack with inline CSS. Used here: font-family: monospace;</p>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>