E-Shots, difficult or not?

lego

lego

lego

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One of my clients has asked me to produce some weekly e-shots for their company. I currently design all their promotional materials (catalogues, flyers POS promotions ect)

Obviously I'm OK with the actual design process of the e-shot, it's the rest thats new to me. I have a basic knowledge of web design, (html a little java / flash) but day in day out I use photoshop & illustrator)

What would be the easiest and quickest way for me set these up?

Thanks
 
Put simply, emails have to be built using all the worst things you can do in web design.

That is to say, use tables and inline CSS. And what CSS you do use, you have to be careful it is actually supported in all clients. Most box-model properties, like padding and margin won't work at all, and background images have patchy support at best.

They're easy to do, just monotonous, and can be infuriating to get looking good in all email clients.
 
Spunkey said:
[...] They're easy to do, just monotonous, and can be infuriating to get looking good in all email clients.
Click to expand...
Particularly mobile clients, which are seeing a massive uptake in email.

As Spunkey said, the code behind an e-shot is about as far from elegant semantic W3C-standards markup as you can get - at least, if you want consistent display across all the major clients.

I'd also politely suggest that you may not be as OK with the design side as you might think. Nothing to do with your design skills, it's just that email places a great deal of constraints on what you can and can't get away with, design-wise.

It's no good creating a beautiful-looking mail that relies on images, for instance, as they don't get shown by default. Gradients, rounded corners, drop shadows? PITA. Transparent PNGs, fancy fonts, video, forms? Forget it.

And yes, because these are tied in so tightly with the code limitations, it can get frustrating very quickly.

When I started off doing HTML emails, I found Campaign Monitor's blog to be an incredibly helpful resource, so I recommend starting there :)
 
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