Author
Jason Rodriguez
Jason Rodriguez is a designer and writer working at Litmus. Most of his days are spent bringing email designers together and making email marketing less painful for everyone. He sometimes writes books, breaks things on his website, and tweets.
Also from this author
Email isn’t just evolving—it’s staging a coup. More and more designers are coming up with exciting new ways of bringing effects like animation and interactivity to the humble inbox. Crucially, for the first time, email client vendors like Microsoft and Google are listening to concerns voiced by email professionals. The web is leaking into the inbox, writes Jason Rodriguez. Don’t get left behind.
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the popularity of HTML emails. And, like the web before it, the inbox has officially gone mobile, with over 50 percent of email opens occurring on mobile devices. Still, email design is an outrageously outdated practice. (Remember coding before web standards became… standards?) But coding an email doesn’t need to be a lesson in frustration. While email designers still have to build layouts using tables and style them with HTML attributes and—gasp!—inline styles, a number of intrepid designers are taking modern techniques pioneered for the web and applying them to the archaic practice of email design. Jason Rodriguez shows how to apply the principles of responsive web design to the frustrating but essential realm of email design.
