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With SXSW 2010 still fresh in our memory, you wouldn't believe that it's time to vote for panels at what should be a bigger and brighter SXSW Interactive 2011. Our team have been given the official nod on three very exciting proposals, so now we need your support.

Each year, thousands of diverse ideas get submitted to the SXSW team. After the votes roll in, this selection of panels and presentations gets whittled down to a considerably smaller, sharper unit. While the panel team have the majority say over who sinks and who swims, your vote will keep us afloat!

If you're planning to go to SXSW Interactive next year and would like to see the following topics covered, please take the time to vote them in. You should also vote if you think Mat is an intensely handsome and articulate fellow, because it would be a vote for the truth.

Get in quick! Voting is open now, until 11:59 CDT on Friday, August 27.

Why do spammers send those emails with random passages of text? How does spam actually work? What is spam, and what isn't? In this panel, Mathew Patterson, the author of "Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works!" and head of customer support will dig below the surface and explore some of the research that is being done into what spam actually is, why people spam, and what happens next.

Vote for this panel if you want to know:

1. What counts as spam? Am I a spammer?
2. Does spam actually work (financially or otherwise)
3. What's the most effective defense against spam

Great design and development is not enough to create a great customer experience. In this panel featuring Mat Patterson and Sarah Hatter from 37signals, find out how small support teams can make a huge impact on thousands of customers through simple tools and techniques and learn from people who've done it personally.

Vote for this panel if you want to know:

1. How to create a customer support experience that promotes your web app, instead of sinking it.
2. Why setting expectations makes customers happy
3. How to apologize when your company f*cks up

Every designer reckons they know how to create and send an HTML email newsletter. It's just like coding for the Web, right? In this panel featuring Ros Hodgekiss, our community manager, alongside a seasoned crew of email designers and marketers, we'll outline the tools, skills and strategies that go into a successful email campaign.

Vote for this panel if you want to know:

1. How to make my design look great across most email clients
2. How I can optimize my campaign results
3. What the future holds for email design

Thank you folks, we really appreciate your votes in the name of good taste and email. It would be a pleasure to meet more of you in Austin next year, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for more SXSW 2011 announcements on this blog.

You have a gorgeous email design that looks great across most of the major clients. You've got the perfect subject line, a thoughtful A/B test in the works, but... No subscribers.

Often, we pay so much attention to the visual and technical beauty of email newsletters, that we overlook the subscribers part altogether. However, as anyone with a soft spot for stats knows, designing an email newsletter subscribe form to attract a maximum number of signups is just as involved as any campaign A/B test... If not more so. After all, with no subscribers, you have no campaigns.

In this round-up, we'll look at 8 standout-yet-simple email subscribe forms that have been crafted largely by our customers and discuss how each goes about making a great first-impression on potential subscribers. Hopefully you will find them as inspiring as we did!

Less is more #1: Super Funky Monkey

First of all, lets start with Super Funky Monkey - an upcoming site for finding desktop wallpapers. What we find so gorgeous about this form is its absolute simplicity - the whole page is dedicated to finding out about their launch, a little about the site and that's it. There's no clutter, no scary product descriptions and the signup form itself is impossible to miss.

Less is more #2: TapPlace

Same goes for TapPlace - an iPhone app which has been released since this screenshot was taken. The lack of detail here is almost a selling point - the less they tell, the more you want to know. According to a Smashing Magazine survey, 61% of designers use this minimized approach to sign-up form design - the central idea being that anything that doesn't help the user to complete the form, shouldn't be there at all.

Less is more #3: Luxylight

Finally in this category, we have Luxylight, an iPhone app that's currently under development. We love the use of glowing buttons, great use of type and modern, textured look to create an enticing signup form for a rather mysterious product...!

The downside of this zen minimalist approach is that it doesn't really let the subscriber know what they're in for. It's worth considering how to strike a balance between aesthetics and context (ie. that you're going to respect their privacy, how frequently you're going to email, what kind of stuff you're going to email), if only to steer clear of potential permission issues.

VaultPress: Who doesn't love mad-libs?

Who can't feel a soft-spot for this playful signup form? Talking about striking a balance between aesthetics and context, this VaultPress piece gives you all the information you need as a potential subscriber, without being dry about it. Before you dismiss this approach as novelty, mad-libs forms have been shown to increase conversion by 25-40% - plus they can be a lot of fun to fill in!

Think you've seen this approach before? Huffduffer had a great shot at it, too.

The Incident: Adding video to increase signups

Although the subscribe form may not be the star-attraction of this page, the video is certainly full of compelling reasons why you should sign up for The Incident's newsletter. In fact, one comparison by ABtests.com found that featuring a video could increase conversion by 81% - so next time you're in a design jam, perhaps you should change your focus from the form itself, to what's near it.

Flight of the Conchords: The most beautiful form in the room

Love them or hate them, lightbox-style forms like this one from Flight of the Conchords simply command attention, while not forcing users to navigate away from where the action is. We love the large, bold type, plus the complete lack of distractions. And Jemaine. Sigh.

Pixel Creation: Skip to the good stuff

What's unique about Pixel Creation's site is the floating 'subscribe' tab on every page. Clicking on this tab scrolls the browser window smoothly to the footer of the site, where the signup form is located. It's a subtle visual cue on a site that doesn't assume that everyone will scroll to the bottom of each page. Yes yes, I know, we're guilty of this!

4 Pines Beer Club: Raising the glass to custom fields

Finally, if you've seen our date-based custom fields, you may have already started thinking of some neat ways to use the 20 fields available to you. 4 Pines has made the most of at least 3 of them, by tastefully collecting date of birth, mobile and postcode/zip code details from their subscribers. Not only does this prevent 4 Pines from marketing alcohol to minors, but it also allows them to gather demographic information and run targeted campaigns based on age and location.

We hope that this round-up has provided some food for thought and a little inspiration when you're next designing a subscribe form. Attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is a central part of the game, after all! If you've got a favorite form or approach to collecting signups, please share it with us in the comments below.

Questions regarding the use of iframes in email crop up from time to time. Whether it be to do with adding content from a site, or a 'Like' Facebook box, we figured that we'd finally do some thorough tests of our own and put the matter to rest.

So, what was the verdict? After testing an email with iframes across 24 major web, desktop and mobile clients, we found that the results weren't particularly promising. As iframes can potentially link to shady or plain malicious content (like scripts), a lot of email clients just disable them.

Here's a breakdown of which email clients display iframes, and which ones do away with them altogether:

How iframes Perform in HTML Emails
Client	Is Displayed?
AOL Webmail
Gmail
Windows Live Hotmail
MobileMe
Yahoo! Mail
AOL 9
Apple Mail 3 / 4
Entourage 2008
Lotus Notes 6 / 7
Lotus Notes 8
Outlook 2000
Outlook Express 6
Outlook XP / 2003 / 2007 / 2010
Thunderbird
Windows Mail
Blackberry
iPhone / iPad
Symbian S60
Windows Mobile 5
Windows Mobile 6
Android (default client)
Android (Gmail client)

Our advice: given the notably poor adoption of iframes, we seriously discourage you from using them. Even though this means that you can't add a 'Like' box to your email, there are alternate ways to share your campaign on Facebook that you can consider.