Corporate Email Stationary - Examples, Best Practice?
- Thread starter Wayn0r
- Start date
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My advice - if you have any say in the matter - is don't use email stationery [i.e. HTML emails] at all.
Before you paint me as some sort of rabid luddite who considers all HTML email to be the work of the devil [y'know, the sort of person that still calls Microsoft "Micro$oft"], I should point out that I designed HTML emails for years.
Not only does all the HTML code [and images, if embedded] add bulk to every single email sent through the pipes [including the cumulative effect of quoted replies and forwards], but every single email client out there renders HTML differently.
To illustrate, my girlfriend recently moaned about her employer's emails being downright unreadable, because the stationery that looked great to the 'designer' in Outlook was broken by the Lotus Notes client her department was forced to use. When a user has to work to read the content of a simple internal email, you know that's a fail of some proportion.
And just imagine the impression that fancy-but-broken-and-hard-to-read emails must make with external recipients.
So if you must use HTML email stationery, my advice is keep it incredibly simple. Don't place the body of an email within a framework of divs or tables, as you might with a newsletter or marketing e-shot thingy, use web-safe fonts, keep images to an absolute minimum, and do all your styling using inline styles [don't link to an external CSS stylesheet, or embed styling within the HTML head].
Also: test, test and test again. On as many email clients as you can get hold of. Test the effects of your stationery being quoted in replies; test the effect of forwarding.
Finally, a company's external business emails are required by law to have their company details visible within each email, in accordance with the Companies Act. See this article.
Hope that helps
- even if it's not particularly inspirational 
[EDIT: I've removed my light-hearted tutting at the word "tasked" as I've just heard Murray Walker say "concertinaing". Suddenly everything's been put into perspective]
Before you paint me as some sort of rabid luddite who considers all HTML email to be the work of the devil [y'know, the sort of person that still calls Microsoft "Micro$oft"], I should point out that I designed HTML emails for years.
Not only does all the HTML code [and images, if embedded] add bulk to every single email sent through the pipes [including the cumulative effect of quoted replies and forwards], but every single email client out there renders HTML differently.
To illustrate, my girlfriend recently moaned about her employer's emails being downright unreadable, because the stationery that looked great to the 'designer' in Outlook was broken by the Lotus Notes client her department was forced to use. When a user has to work to read the content of a simple internal email, you know that's a fail of some proportion.
And just imagine the impression that fancy-but-broken-and-hard-to-read emails must make with external recipients.
So if you must use HTML email stationery, my advice is keep it incredibly simple. Don't place the body of an email within a framework of divs or tables, as you might with a newsletter or marketing e-shot thingy, use web-safe fonts, keep images to an absolute minimum, and do all your styling using inline styles [don't link to an external CSS stylesheet, or embed styling within the HTML head].
Also: test, test and test again. On as many email clients as you can get hold of. Test the effects of your stationery being quoted in replies; test the effect of forwarding.
Finally, a company's external business emails are required by law to have their company details visible within each email, in accordance with the Companies Act. See this article.
Hope that helps
- even if it's not particularly inspirational [EDIT: I've removed my light-hearted tutting at the word "tasked" as I've just heard Murray Walker say "concertinaing". Suddenly everything's been put into perspective
]
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