Keeping on top of your design

For a designer, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in email creation is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve at an almost inhuman rate, html mail delivery has not been subject to the same level of progression.

The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many headaches; unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe’ colour schemes and so many essential present-day CSS attributes made 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 on board before working on that all-important eshot or newsletter?

Invest time in 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 gurus have caught wind of it.

Think in code

Most designers work within their designated graphics package, slicing up their image so the finished file can be applied to an html document. In principle there is no real problem with this but there are plenty of pitfalls. Try to think as you are designing – how you are going to achieve the look within an html document?

Designing for the web is a lot more like sculpting than painting by numbers. Think of your document as starting with core building blocks, slabs of granite that you will use CSS and tables to chisel away and 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 has seen some of the worst updates to email clients, most importantly the introduction of Outlook 2007. It is well documented in the release notes that many crucial CSS1 and CSS2 elements 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 investing in the latest edition of the Office suite.