Bentley Brief Generator

A build tool that took the designer out of the monthly email

Role: Design Engineer, Bentley University
Context: Communications platforms (Slate)
Outcome: Cut production time 40%

The short version

40% less production time
Enabled producers to build without viewing code
Replaced a tool whose output was too heavy to paste

What it was: A heavily used email template was running into errors and forcing producers to look at code, leading to a bottleneck where I had to debug or fix design issues as components and colors drifted from spec.
What I did: Proposed, designed, and built a tool for content owners and email producers that let them build faster without looking at code. The application features discrete sections that can be easily reordered, multiple content layout options, integrated merge fields, mobile and desktop previews, save states for setting up different segments, and the ability to quickly export to the EMS (Slate).
What changed: Production time dropped about 40%, and a producer builds and sends their work without a designer or developer having to go into the weeds.

The problem

The Bentley Brief goes out monthly. Building it in Slate with the native component builder was a buggy experience, and third-party solutions bloated the code to the point where it was too large to paste back into Slate.

A producer or content owner had to deal with reading through code, slowing the process down. Whenever the content called for a minor variation or ran into an edge case, a developer had to go through it and either fix issues or hand it to design to adjust the template to accommodate the content. Sometimes the design would drift with use, leading to periodic QA work that could be avoided with something less fragile.

What I built

A browser-based email builder: controls on the left, a live preview of the actual email on the right, updating as you type.

The Brief Generator with its Settings panel open. The panel lists toggles for scroll-on-hover and merge-field sample values, an auto-save timestamp with a Start Fresh button, and a version history of timestamped snapshots each with a Restore button. Behind it sit the two panes of the builder — form controls on the left, a live preview rendering the Bentley Brief email on the right — with a size meter across the top reading 76.7 KB of 255 KB. — Settings open over the two-pane builder: auto-save, and a version history you can restore from. Controls left, live preview of the actual email right, size meter across the top.

Modular sections that are added, reordered by dragging, and removed without touching markup
Multiple layout options for the content inside each section
One-click merge fields, so personalization tokens are never typed from memory
Mobile and desktop previews
A live size meter that tracks the email against Slate and Gmail size limits
Placeholder warnings that count example text, links and images still waiting to be replaced
Auto-save and saved versions, so different segments can be set up and restored
Quick export to Slate

The top of the builder. A meter across the very top reads “Slate email size: 72.8 KB of 255 KB (29%)” with a green bar filled to roughly a third. Below it, a Warnings panel lists in red: example text still appears 22 times, 11 links still point to the example URL, 11 placeholder images are still in use, and an event still has its example date and title. — Both constraints, visible while you work: the send limit as a number that moves, and a count of everything still left at its example value.

Part of a larger whole

The generator is one half of a pair, and the other is a design system for Slate, with component and template libraries, HTML-based components, a QA process and form theming with division-level overrides.

The design system defines what a correct Bentley email is, and the generator is how someone produces one without having to know all of that, which is why both were needed rather than one or the other.