An introduction to creating rich HTML emails - A designer's cheat sheet
June 16th, 2009 7:41pm in cheat sheet, creatives group, css, email, html, talk, web design
On Thursday of last week I, once again, gave a talk to the Twin Cities’ Creatives Group. This time, instead of doing a quick talk on what a designer should know before trying to design a web page for the web, I tried to expose what the limitations are in doing a good design for HTML email. Unfortunately, I didn’t start recording the talk until I was at least 20 minutes into it, and not only that, after just looking at the footage, the sound is awful. So, no recorded talk this time — but here’s the PDF of the slide deck as a reference for those of you who wanted to have a look at it.
Here’s a quick summary of the talk:
- HTML email is a limited subset of HTML with plain text as part of the message
- CSS not well supported, revert to tables
- No JavaScript
- Email width between 600px and 700px
- Many, many clients – test, test, test
- Choose Serif or Sans-serif – KISS
- Spam testing – triggers are cumulative
- Use a good Email Marketing service
- Consider a web version of the message
Perhaps I’ll give this talk somewhere else in the future and perhaps it will get recorded.