It's a huge step forward. It effectively means that we will be able to do traditional responsive stuff using media queries but perhaps more importantly, we can stop having to use inline styles everywhere. That means a big reduction in duplicated code and HTML emails that are MUCH easier to maintain. The increase in efficiency will allow email people to focus on creating better content so that emails are more useful to people.
You should look into http://www.stampready.net - along with Campaign Monitor's email builder (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/create-custom-email...), it's one of the best drag-and-drop tools for creating really good, responsive emails. The problem with any of these tools is that they still spit out sometimes convoluted code, but that can't really be avoided since they need to cover their asses in literally dozens of different popular email clients.
If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.
Thanks. Do these support responsive emails on the gmail android client? Unfortunately the gmail client does not support media queries, which makes building a responsive email for it very difficult.
That's a good question. I'm not sure about StampReady, but Campaign Monitor has a few of the best email designers in the biz working there (namely Nicole Merlin and Stig Morten Myre) who strive for really robust templates. Nicole in particular has written about her approach (typically called 'hybrid' or 'spongey' development), which works without media queries. It's basically using fluid tables, max-width, and MSO conditional tables to get things working and is the best approach around these days. You can read more about it here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-pr...
I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.
Great work, Matt. I think you guys did a great job with these, especially having multiple layouts for each template to handle different use cases. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that one layout works for every situation—it's nice to see you guys helping to remedy that misconception.
We like the idea of "purpose driven" templates, and that's why we've designed that way. Who thinks "I want a 3 column email template"? Most people think "I need to send a notification email". That's what we tried to design for.
Ink is cool. There are a surprising number of templates out there now, too. Brian Graves has a great site of resources with a template section at http://responsiveemailresources.com/
Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish in email these days. While there are still problem email clients when it comes to responsive (Gmail, the Gmail mobile app, some Android clients, and a few iOS clients like Mailbox), you can build responsive emails fairly easily.
While it's true that you need to rely on tables, some HTML attributes, and a lot of inline styles - we routinely use classes, media queries, and CSS3 in our emails at Litmus. We've even pulled off HTML5 video backgrounds and some cool stuff with CSS3 animations. All in email.
Outlook definitely has issues, more recently with rendering in Outlook.com, but they are known issues—most with quick fixes.
More importantly, there are a ton of great resources out there. At Litmus, we actually started a community around email design to help people learn and troubleshoot (https://litmus.com/community). If anyone's interested, here are some good email design resources:
Email is definitely its own, weird world - but it's a world that is improving and growing every day. More importantly, it's a world filled with dedicated and clever people that are refining techniques, building tools, and sharing knowledge to make working with email easier than ever.
Actually I'm surprised at what can be accomplished in email these days, but in a negative way (sorry to be too pessimistic).
In the browser I already got my peace of mind back when it comes to cross-browser compatibility, because I can design a website in the browser of my choice, and when I test in other browsers, most of times there are no issues, or the issues are too minimal to get upset by having to fix them.
It's cool to have a place with an active community where someone can find tools, resources, workarounds, etc., but that is just a way to alleviate the problem.
An e-mail standard proposal[1] already exists, but providers (especially Google) doesn't seem too motivated to adhere to that standard :/...
Shameless self promotion, I also wrote a book on the subject called Modern HTML Email - http://modernhtmlemail.com - good way to get into responsive email design and email marketing in general.
I'm actually the Community Manager at Litmus. If you still use the service and have issues, don't hesitate to shoot us an email at hello@litmus.com - we're always trying to improve the service and help out our customers.
There are a ton of email service providers out there. For that size of a list, you will probably be spending at least a little bit of money. My favorite ESP is CampaignMonitor - http://campaignmonitor.com - but a lot of people really like MailChimp, Emma, or CakeMail.
I would recommend doing two things to announce it - (1) Add something on the community site. If you have a sidebar or area on the front and other pages - add a section with a quick blurb on what it is along with a signup form. (2) If you have the community users' emails, send them an email with an invitation to sign up for the newsletter. Since they already signed up for the community - this would fall under the umbrella of transactional email - so you don't technically need permission from them to send them email - I just wouldn't use this list for the actual newsletter list - just to ask their permission to get on the newsletter list.
If users have a dashboard page or something similar, you can always make an announcement there as well. The main thing is that you want them to give you express permission to start sending them newsletters. Don't just start blasting to that list.
Having a plain text option is definitely an important part of email marketing. I still enjoy receiving HTML emails from certain companies and people - its usually an interesting web design niche and there are some cool designs out there.
To each his own, but HTML email marketing is still a BIG business.
I just read all the comments on Designer News. All I can say is "wow". Did all those commenters even read the article? For those who didn't read it, the overall point was simply focus (don't get distracted with efforts that aren't directly contributing to your bottom line and measure your results so you can make informed decisions, honing in on what factually works for you).
Sure, Robert may have put a particular website in a bad light, isn't earning $1M, and maybe tried to find some value in some lessons from online courses (omg), but the point was clear: the competition was homogenous and he wanted to stand out (good). The best marketing strategy is to speak to your audience's needs, not necessarily your industry's ideals. I'm making a broad assumption here, but I feel like most business clients (those likely to hire an agency or a freelance designer) are more concerned with making themselves more money (through effective design) than "looking pretty". I think Robert was accurate in that observation.
Robert had some experience, found some stuff that worked for him, and is trying to share it with the community to help others learn where he maybe didn't have access to learn. I think that's admirable. I don't know why people on Designer News are shitting all over on him. Geez.
WTF... why? for sharing my story? how is this blog post in anyway a "thin veil for a get-rich-quick scheme"? I'm not selling anything, I'm simply talking about what my experience was, and that I decided to focus on other things instead of a portfolio...
I agree, but what I find odd is how a submitter of a story can also be implicated (ignoring the point the submitter is actually the author in this case, I think?)
Why would anyone want to submit stuff to a site if there's a risk they could get banned if people on the site don't like the item? That's what voting and/or flagging are for. Banning should be for abusive behavior, not poor submissions.
How did you reach that conclusion? Did you start from the idea that the course is nothing but a get-rich-quick scheme and therefor no one could benefit from it and the blog post must be a sham?
Do you think that he didn't do what he said or that he is maybe getting some consideration from Ramith Sethi or something?
To my naive eye they guy seems to have written a post about a course of action that he is happy with and has given him some success. Is that so hard to believe? It doesn't that deleting your portfolio is the best course of action, it's just what he did.
Or is it the emphasis on revenue that rubs you the wrong way?
I'm asking all these questions because I just can't wrap my head around the negative reaction.
It confuses me too. If there was an affiliate link to Earn1k and he spent the whole post talking about it then I can see it being considered spammy.
I wonder if the DN mods would be so quick to ban the post if he had mentioned the name of a book he found useful, rather than the name of an online course.
Perhaps it is because he has the audacity to be motivated by money, rather than a pure love for design, and this upsets the DN team?
I'm just here to say that Ramit, the author of the course he mentioned is legitimate.
His New York Times best selling book "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" is one of the best personal finance books I've read. It is especially useful for young people with a high income potential like many of us on Hacker News.
Wow. If that's what you took away from the author's post, I seriously question DN's capacity to moderate. This, on top of the FlatUI fiasco, leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. My interest in DN is less and less each day.
Hellbanned? Why? I'm a freaking designer and as one I can tell you I found the article rather interesting. Deleting your portfolio and making money? That's something you don't hear everyday. The fear of freelancing is not finding any clients. He found a way and shared his story, good for him. I found it irritating he didn't link to this Earn1K course. Had to google it and of course there are multiple hits. How do I know I've got the right one? I'd apologise if I was Designer News. Making money is not 'evil'.
Hmm it has to be a really thin veil because I read it like any other post to get the author's point of view then checked out the comments. I'm sure marketers are trying to innovate like everyone else but in this case I would have to say it didn't work because I still haven't gotten to the get rich quick e/book that it is supposed to promote (it wasn't in my face).
The comments sure are interesting but the only thing I checked out from reading it was the designer's site that got dissed.
Note: The post could have been edited by the time I read it.
