Adding your logo and brand colours to an internal newsletter

Internal comms lives or dies on whether it looks like it came from your company. A newsletter carrying an unfamiliar colour and no logo gets read as a marketing email; one carrying your masthead gets read as the company update. Branding is a five-minute job and it's worth doing before your first send.

Step 1 — Upload your logo or banner

Go to Team settings → Edit (there's a shortcut link under the Template picker in the newsletter builder) and upload an image under Logo or banner.

• Format: PNG with a transparent background works best — it sits cleanly on both white and coloured backgrounds. JPG and SVG-exported PNGs are fine too.
• Resolution: upload at roughly twice the size you want it displayed, so it stays sharp on high-DPI screens. A 1200px-wide image displayed at 600px is ideal.
• Contrast: if your logo is white or very light, it will vanish on the white templates. Export a dark version for email, or use the Branded template, which puts the logo on its own white strip above the colour band.

Step 2 — Choose how large it appears

Under Logo size in the newsletter, pick how wide the image renders in the header:

• Small (120px) — a discreet mark above the subject line.
• Medium (180px) — the default. Suits most square or horizontal logos.
• Large (280px) — for wordmarks that need room to breathe.
• Full width banner (600px) — spans the full content width. Upload a wide masthead image ("The Monday Memo", a photo strip, a designed header) and this turns it into a proper newsletter banner.

Full width is the option to use if you already have a newsletter banner from a designer. Export it at 1200 × 300px and it will render as a 600px-wide masthead at the top of every issue.

Step 3 — Set your brand colour

The Brand colour field takes a hex value and drives the coloured band, the rules under headings, and the accent details in every template. Paste in the hex from your brand guidelines — if you don't have one to hand, most companies' primary colour is in the footer of the corporate website or in a slide master.

A darker, more saturated colour generally reads better in email than a pastel, because it has to hold white text on the Branded template.

A note on fonts

Internal Newsletter offers eight typefaces — Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Courier New — set once under Newsletter typeface in team settings. Custom web fonts are deliberately absent, because Outlook doesn't load them: a newsletter set in your brand's web font renders perfectly in a browser preview and falls back to an arbitrary system font in the client most of your colleagues actually use. If your brand font isn't available, match its shape rather than its name — a serif brand reads well in Georgia, a humanist sans in Verdana or Tahoma.

Step 4 — Pick the template that matches your branding

Your logo and colour appear in every template, but each one places them differently. Change the template from the Template dropdown in the newsletter builder and the preview updates instantly.

• Clean — thin brand-colour stripe along the top, logo left-aligned above the subject. The safest all-rounder.
• Bold — logo centred, subject line set large in your brand colour. Good when the headline needs to land.
• Classic — logo left-aligned inside a bordered white card on a grey background. Reads like a publication.
• Minimal — logo above a brand-coloured rule, no background colours. Closest to a plain internal email.
• Branded — logo on a white strip, then a full-width band in your brand colour with the subject in white. The most "corporate comms" of the five.

Adding a hero image inside the newsletter

The logo sits in the header on every issue. For a one-off image — an event photo, a chart, a campaign graphic — add a content block instead and attach a featured image with the size set to large. That renders full width at the top of that block, and changes issue to issue while your masthead stays constant.

Checking it before you send

Images are the part of an email most likely to break in the wild. Two things worth doing before your first real send:

1. Send yourself a preview and open it in the client your colleagues actually use — usually Outlook. Images render fine, but many organisations block remote images by default until the reader clicks "download pictures", so your newsletter should still make sense with the logo missing.
2. Check the alt text. Your logo's alt text is your team name automatically, so a blocked image still shows who the newsletter is from.

For the wider set of rendering rules, see the guide to designing emails for Outlook.

Common questions

Can I use a different logo per newsletter? Not currently — the logo is set at team level so every issue is consistent. For a one-off graphic, use a content block featured image.

How do I remove the logo? Tick Remove next to the current logo in Team settings and save. The header collapses back to just the subject line and brand colour.

Do my colleagues need to do anything? No. Branding is stored on the team, so everyone editing newsletters gets the same header automatically.