Best Practice
Keeping on top of your design
One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in email creation for a designer is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve and enhance at an almost inhuman rate html mail delivery has kept its front foot firmly in the past.
The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many a headache, unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe' colour schemes and so many essential present day CSS attributes unavailable. A beautifully crafted design in Photoshop can soon become a blocky unyielding behemoth, far from the designer's original concept.
So what preparation tasks can be taken onboard before working on that all important eshot or newsletter?
Research
Often overlooked is the value of good research. There are many forums, blogs and community sites relating to online marketing but you shouldn't overlook more ‘tech' orientated news sites such as The Register and TechRepublic in your quest for good design.
Topics such as browser updates and the new set of bugs that often accompany them are more likely to appear in such a publication long before the marketing guru's have caught wind of it.
Think in code
Most designers work within their designated graphics package, slice up their image and save it out be applied to a html document.
In principle there is no real problem with this, but there are plenty of pitfalls. Try to think as you are designing of how you are going to achieve the look within an html document.
Designing for the web is a lot more like sculpting than paint by numbers, thinking of your document with your core building blocks as a slab of granite and using css and tables to chisel away to create something entirely different. The graphical design is effectively your sketch.
Know your limits
I'm not talking about whether or not you can recreate Van Gogh's Sunflowers, but the limitation of the environment you are working in. 2008 and seen some of the worst updates to email clients. Most importantly is the introduction of Outlook 2007. It is well documented in the release notes of the many crucial CSS1 and CSS2 elements which have been disabled in Microsoft's latest release including background-image, float, z-index, max-width and max-height.
These need to be taken into consideration as your target audiences begin invest in the latest edition of the Office suite.