Email formats and designs
HTML and CSS
Multimedia and interactive email design
Webmail issues
Email design testing services
Image blocking and suppression
Mobile email design
Read up on key email design issues, such as best practices for using HTML or CSS, text layouts, adding interaction, designing for deliverability, coping with blocked images, designing for mobile devices, and more.
Latest from the blog
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.
Popular articles:
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.
Other articles:
Anatomy of a lousy email
Uses a fake example to point out that what looks good on paper doesn't work so well in email.
Sometimes less can be more
Offers basic design guidelines and describes how traditional advertising material cannot be automatically transferred to this medium.
Evaluating design
Offers up some criteria you can use when evaluating a proposed email design, despite the inherent subjectivity of the topic area.
Quick checklist
Rough overview of basic design and copy principles for marketing emails, covering preview panes, headers, length, images, format etc.
Animated gifs
Results of tests on how different clients and webmail services treat animated gifs in emails.
Image links versus text links versus buttons: 1, 2, 3 and 4
Several articles addressing the issue of whether links, table cells that look like buttons or images work best as a call to action in an email.
Design checklist for 2007
Over 30 bullet points covering the overall design, use of HTML, images, text content, best practices, and testing.
Design for handhelds
Some simple suggestions for improving your chances of getting your email displayed sensibly on PDAs, Blackberries and other such mobile devices.
Animation in emails
Outlines some of the benefits of animated elements. And touches on the potential problems, too.
HTML or text?
Overview of the pros and cons of each.
Email rendering FAQ
Uses a question and answer format to introduce people to various hot topics in email design, particularly image blocking and preview panes.
Branding text emails
Nice blog post explaining the importance of the header in a text email. That's the bit at the top of the email, where people first cast their eye.
Don't forget the text version
Outlines the reasons why providing a text alternative to your HTML email is important: for better responses and better deliverability.
What fonts say about your emails
Commentary on (and links to) two academic reports describing the emotional impact of fonts and showing which fonts are best suited to particular online uses.