Gallery: Announcement

Coming from the boutique app developer Happy Tapper is this appropriately cheery and friendly announcement email. The first thing to notice is the social links in the header that make it easy for people to connect with the sender.

Simple illustrations combined with the serif font give the whole email a decidedly non-technical feel that suits the company brand and sets it apart from the ultra-shiny competition. Finally, those colored and hand drawn action buttons really stand out as you scan down the page. Great work.

One of the regular complaints we hear about HTML email is “I don’t want my email all full of useless images” but of course HTML doesn’t have to mean images. Today’s gallery entry from Canadian Art is almost all text, apart from the header. Using simple font control and background colors, basic text has been made much more visually striking.

This works around the problem of images not being shown without sacrificing branding or impact. Our main suggestion would be to make the permission reminder more specific - “because you were subscribed to our list” doesn’t tell someone how they subscribed.

We thought this campaign for Like.ie was pretty cool. The text is big and well spaced, making it easy to read and the colors are soft and are gentle on the eye. Although the campaign does pass when images are suppressed, we feel that having the call to action buttons as images can be a bit risky if they disappear completely when no alt text is assigned. That said, the phone numbers and the subscribe and visit our website links at the bottom are still visible if a subscriber wants to know more. Overall, a nice design.

This template has such a nice, warm personable feel to it. Email Jam have done well to carry the Woodie & Morris tone and brand throughout the campaign. As the site wasn’t available at the time the campaign was sent, the call to action was to invite the subscribers to visit the shop using the incentive of a preview evening before a sale. A great & clever way to treat their subscribers and make them feel special, which I’m sure worked well.

There are many little attentions to detail that make this template for me. The torn paper effect between content blocks; the stitching around the Forward to a friend button. The imagery used is subtle but clear and the number association between text description and product photo is a nice touch.

All in all, a simple and highly effective template that ticks many boxes. And given a consistently high open rate, the all important subscribers must think so too!

I absolutely love this design from Style Campaign. Not just for the design, although with the bright pops of pixelated colors and cheerful PacMan imagery, it has it in spades. No, I love this campaign in part for the geek factor. In addition to being stunningly designed it’s absolutely genius when it comes to coding. Using absolutely no images it’s an utter marvel of email design, but it’s still light enough code-wise (just 14k) to bypass spam filters and get past Gmail’s 100k limitations, not to mention be swift to load on the plethora of mobile clients out there. No small feat!

The CSS3 drop shadows on the text were an added bonus as well; they added a richness in those browsers/email clients that support it and nothing is really lost in those clients that don’t. It’s great seeing a campaign that brings some new ideas to the table and isn’t afraid of using code that isn’t fully supported. Can’t let the Lotus Notes and Outlooks of the world stop us all the time, sometimes you just have to experiment!