Email formats and designs


Read up on key email design issues, such as best practices for using HTML or CSS, plain text layouts, adding interactive elements, designing for deliverability, coping with blocked images, designing for mobile devices, and more.

Popular articles:

22 sources of inspiration for innovative designs and tactics
Just like it says in the title: sites that show you some of the interesting things other email senders are doing.

Litmus design preview tool: a user review
An independent review of the popular service that shows you how your email displays in various webmail, desktop and mobile email software environments.

Novelty in email design
Outlines the risks and rewards of novel design approaches and elements like horizontal scrolling or animation.

Change your email template to match the relationship
Most templates are designed for strangers. This post identifies the template elements you could or should change when mailing long-time subscribers.

Better preheaders
Advice on how to get (much) more out of your preheader text. (See also this preheader alignment tip.)

Animated gifs in email
Advice on tactics and application, best practice examples and links to other sources of insight.

42 HTML email design resources
A roundup of the best articles, tools, references and websites for those designing emails in anything other than plain text.

Gmail inbox tricks and alt text traps
How to use preheaders and images to get your email more prominence in the Gmail inbox.

Time to kill the "view as web page" link?
Describes how you should judge the value of this traditional email link and maybe delete it from your templates.

Images in email: time for change
Describes the various benefits of dynamic image swapping in your email campaigns.

Better URL design for more clicks
Looks at how your tracking URLs might affect the propensity to click.

Plain text emails: design and format tips
Collection of articles and other resources to improve the appearance of your text-only messages.

Outlook and plain text emails
Plain text emails can become hard to read in various versions of Outlook if you're not careful about your formatting.

Deliverendability
Article suggests using tactics ostensibly designed to improve delivery rates to instead improve the functionality of your emails.

Email Standards Project: the big interview
The project's founder talks about the goals, activities and success chances of the initiative to ensure consistency in the way email clients and webmail services handle HTML email.

Email design insights from David Greiner
Lots of practical tips on designs to aspire to, typical mistakes, easy design wins...and much more (including three beautiful newsletters to get inspiration from).

Designing text emails
A collection of basic rules on how to ensure text emails -- and the links inside them -- get displayed as intended.

URL design
Looks at how the URLs you use in an email can make a difference to responses and points to various articles that discuss the subject of URL design.