Trying To Find The Road Not Taken

In March 2006 I attended An Event Apart in Boston. I loved attending the conference and came away inspired and excited about my profession again. Following the event, the wonderful people at A List Apart created a survey. A survey that was much needed for the field.

This year they’ve done it again. If you work in the web field, please take a moment to fill it out.

Two Friday’s ago Craig, Kelly and I went down to New York City for the opening day of the New York International Auto Show. Craig and I have been several times over the past 14 years. This year we planned to look at the hybrid and alternative fuel options on the market, prototypes and future concepts. The biggest change that struck me was the lack of “extras” this year. Minimal print advertising to walk away with, minimal schwag to promote the brands. Everything was focused on the cars, the booth, displays showing their new technologies.

We had a good time, went in with a clear focus and didn’t lose a whole day strolling around the Javits Center. A note on parking, it’s gone up. It’s usually $40.00 at the lots around it, this time it was $50.00.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Today launches the Email Standards Project. I can not begin to convey the importance of this project. To help relate why this is so important, I’m going to give you some background on how I ended up designing emails for a living and a typical day.

Background
I started designing websites in 1997. It was at an internship while in high school. My goal was to go to college and get a degree in Graphic Design. I did go off to college and have my degree in Graphic Design. While at that internship I made a significant switch from the world of print which I started learning to digital. After college I continued to work designing websites.

In late August 2007 I was introduced to the world of email design. The company I was employed with decided to get into email marketing. It was there that I learned I’d have to step back to 1997 in terms of markup for my HTML. Marking the first frustration.

A Typical Day
I get a project, that a company wants to send out an email to their customers. It’s best when I am able to design the piece from scratch but many times I get “suggestions” or the actual photoshop file handed to me to “make work”. From here I deconstruct the PSD file, or work off my own, and make precise cuts and determine what can be actual text and what will not be guaranteed to translate over correctly in all email clients.

I then go into Dreamweaver and layout my HTML file with CSS. After it’s displaying correctly as a webpage, I then change over all my CSS to inline CSS. For “padding”, many times I need to use transparent spacer.gif files, even more so when dealing with Lotus Notes which does not render any padding/margins what-so-ever.

After all the CSS has been placed inline and no shorthand. I copy it over to our system, upload all the images, make sure the images have full paths and start testing.

This is the “fun” part. Every email client wants to render things differently. I also have to plan ahead for the end user having turned off images.

Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird are hands down the best at truly rendering things as you think they should look. Lotus Notes is hands down the worst.

So in a nutshell this is why E-Mail Standards are so important. Head over to http://www.email-standards.org to learn more, join up and help support a very worthy cause!