Email design resources

One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails.  It’s a good mix of theory and explanation and some code examples.
Very useful if you’re trying to create pretty HTML emails from scratch.

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Mail that looks good on desktop and mobile

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.

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CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter.

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HTML in email

Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do look for invalid tags and comments, but I check those whether they are in the header or the body.
Those of you that design HTML emails, what are your experiences with headers? Are there specific HTML headers that you always include? Do you skip the header portion of the HTML document and just use body tags? How do you test? What do you think is important?

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