Travelbound provide exciting holidays for schools and students alike. Their desire to add this excitement and sense of adventure to the email marketing lead them to the creative team at pure360.com.

Andy Parker, html - email designer at Pure360 takes us through the process of creating an email template which stays on-brand and makes email truly interactive.

When creating any form of advertising it's vital to get the right balance between text and imagery.
Too much text and the viewer will lose interest, too little and they'll be left bewildered as to what it is they are looking at.

Applying this to email design adds a few extra considerations: spam rating, legibility, cross platform bugs and more. In this best practice guide we are going to look a little more in depth into these areas and their implication for HTML email design. By the end you should be confident in how to correctly render images in emails along with keeping the right balance between text and graphics. As you'll see, when it comes to email, design matters.

In the not too distant past, footers were seen as the dreary domain of permission based email marketing. Full of dull clauses, legal statements, obligatory copyright markers and contact information.

With a new breed of information-hungry designers emerging to the forefront of web design, the footer has begun to evolve into a hotbed of information. A prime example of this on the web is the recently redesigned BBC web portal.

In the infancy of the World Wide Web certain terms of reference were used to guide those that had ventured into the purchase of a 56k modem.

Direct instructions such as “click on thumbnail to view larger image” and the most commonly used “click here” statement were implemented to show this first generation of web surfers how the browser took you from one page to the next.