Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“.

This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine style, then display the columns side-by-side on desktop clients and top to bottom on mobile clients. That opens up much more interesting designs than the more common single fluid column approach.

It looks nice, it supports pretty much every interesting email client, but it also comes with some directions based on real world experience.

• Stopping Apple mail clients from turning bits of your content that look like dates or phone numbers or addresses into ugly blue links
• Avoiding the Hotmail “why is my text green?” issue
• Making Yahoo desktop show the desktop version, not the mobile version of the content
• Maintaining your brand colours and fonts on gmail

The Antwort documentation also has lots of good links and advice on HTML authoring for email. Well worth a look.