HTML Email Design: A Specialized Art

A major frustration within the industry is the lack of standards to guide designers when creating HTML email. Though there isn't one email-marketing design bible, there are fundamental design rules that should be applied. This article by Winston Bowden reviews some of the high-level design principles as well as more in-depth rules affecting some of the most common issues and questions. Here are some clippings from the article:

clipped from www.marketingprofs.com Though there isn't one email-marketing design bible, there are fundamental design rules that should be applied. designers have several limitations, including the lack of CSS support. What does this mean for you? Hire a designer who is familiar with email marketing design. Make sure your designer has access to several client platforms, including Outlook 2007/2003, Entourage, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Thunderbird, and Yahoo. Confused about which email clients you should test? Look at your list. Make sure that your designer uses alt tags. Finding a good designer requires asking lots of questions and reviewing past work. Designers should place critical information near the top of the email as text rather than embedding it in the jpeg or gif image. email marketing design is a specialized art that requires dedication and skill. good email marketing designers are hard to find. don't assume excellent Web designers are going to be a natural fit for your email campaigns.

Comments

[Neil Anuskiewicz]

You are absolutely right. We at StreamSend have someone who designs custom email templates for some of our clients, and we find that it is his experience designing emails that is the most valuable.

While there is quite a bit of overlap between Web and email design skills, they are definitely not the same thing.

A lot of people do not realize this. One way to see how things are progressing in your email design is to send a test email out to view in different email clients, such as Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. You may find that something that looks great in one email client, looks terrible in another and you have to make adjustments.

The thing about Web design is there are only a few popular Web browsers and most of the time the Web page is rendered more or less the same in each Web browser. This is not necessarily true in the world of many email programs.

With some practice, though, a good Web designer can become a good email designer without too much trouble...