Once upon a time, our customer-base was primarily centered here in the United States and some of our design patterns reflect that. For example, our address forms use the term “zip code” and require a state. But these days, we’re noticing that our users are all over the world. In fact, it turns out that London now holds the title for the highest concentration of MailChimp users. That’s why we’re working on tweaking a few things in the app to be more international friendly, and we’re starting with our address forms.

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If you’ve created a new template in MailChimp since our last update, you may have noticed our fancy new header designer. It was developed by one of our newer devs, Dustin, and adds tons of functionality and flexibility to the header design process. We’ve also revamped our stock header images gallery and have included categories to more closely reflect our industry list. Agriculture, Architecture, Consulting and Education, just to name a few.

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So I was talking with the folks at InboxLove about sponsoring their upcoming event. They tell me it’s all headed up by Dave McClure, who runs 500 Startups. The person on the phone tells me that Dave is a big believer in the inbox as a platform (which is why he’s holding this awesome event in the first place), and that he also likes startups that appreciate the importance of good design.

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Redesigning MailChimp

“Information presented with clear and logically set out titles, subtitles, texts, illustrations and captions will not only be read more quickly and easily but the information will also be better understood and retained in the memory. This is a scientifically proven fact and the designer should bear it constantly in mind”

-Josef Muller Brockmann

We’ve now had almost a month to gauge the response to the redesign, and we feel it was overwhelmingly positive. We’re glad so many people tweeted feedback, concerns, likes, dislikes and in general just cared enough to express an opinion at all. Thanks so much for that. We thought it would be fun and hopefully informative to share some insight into our motives and to dispel any notions that the redesign was purely for cosmetic reasons.

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We’re pretty darn excited that one of our all time favorite conferences in the world, An Event Apart, is coming back to our home town, Atlanta. Hosted by web luminaries, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, An Event Apart is an intensely educational learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference for you.

Many moons ago, I attended AEA when it was held at the home of the Atlanta Braves, Turner Field. It was smaller then and it was just one day, but it made a huge impression on me. The sessions were filled with practical information that I was able to use in my work, but I also had the opportunity to talk to and hang out with my web idols. It’s an event that is as much about community building as it is learning. That experience left me inspired and ready to do cool stuff. Since then I’ve been to AEA about a dozen times, and I still walk away with a pocket full of inspiring gems.

We’re really proud to be sponsoring AEA this year along with our friends over at Typekit. We hope to see you in Atlanta, or at one of the 5 other AEAs around the US. In fact, you can save $100 bones off any two- or three-day ticket with code AEACHIMP.

http://aneventapart.com