I’m not ashamed to say the illustrations do it for me here. There’s something to be said for the emotional responses they evoke. The site itself is pretty straightforward but where I think this wins is that the drawings give life and a positive personality to what really can be a daunting task – building HTML emails.
It’s important to note that the positioning of the illustrations isn’t just to make light of such a job. It supports the fact that it can be FUN, especially when they do all the heavy lifting for you! Essentially you go from associating the happy little email guys to the task, to identifying with them yourself. After all, they’re making your life easier by using the service.
All that said, I would have liked to see small bits of that style carried through to more than just the ‘home’ and ‘tour’ pages.