Central Bottle

By Davida Fernandez

January 25, 2010

6 Comments

Designed by Visual Dialogue

The very cool line drawing logo is the top note, the super macro photo background is the depth and the grid layout for the content provides the structure. All these elements come together in this engaging email design, like flavors in a sip of layered and bold red wine.

This is a really great example of how to use a background image: as purely decorative, because not all email clients will display it. If the designer wanted to retain the wine corks' rich, earthy tones in the instance that images were disabled in a recipients' email client, they could have coded in a fallback background color, picked from the cork photo. Nonetheless, the email still looks great on a plain white background.

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6 Comments

  1. DRoss
    January 25, 2010 1:43pm

    Agreed. A background color from the image should have been used for backup instead of white. Nice job on the email otherwise.

  2. Sam Evans
    January 26, 2010 1:18am

    What is the current support for background images? Is it just through CSS that background-image is unsupported? Is <body background=“background.jpg”> still supported?

  3. Eric
    January 26, 2010 6:33am

    I think this design degrades nicely, but could be even more graceful if the white boxes had a 1px gray border so when the background image isn’t displayed they still pop a little.

  4. jesse
    January 26, 2010 1:02pm

    @ dross: we tried a variety of fallback background colors. but the logo seemed to work best on white

    @sam: i usually spec the background image on the table instead of the body. however, we just discovered this gem: <table background=“theimage.jpg”> which shows the background image in gmail!

    @ eric: good point. will consider implementing since we are doing some updates to the templates.

  5. sioux falls cars
    January 27, 2010 3:15am

    That is absolutely gorgeous!  What a simple and yet nice design.

  6. Matt
    March 11, 2010 12:14am

    I like this design, although I was under the impression background images are not supported in most email clients… so you wouldn’t see the lovely image background

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