Producing HTML emails is a hazardous job; those of us who do it bear the scars to prove it. Unfortunately what had been a “War of Attrition” between designers/developers and incompatible standards have scaled to “Trench Warfare”; and we are on the losing side. The release of Outlook 2007 and the rise of Google as an email provider has severely muddle an already complicated ecosystem. Outlook’s new HTML rendering engine and Gmail’s inconsistent standard implementation are a huge setback to the hard-won achievements we’ve gained in the last few years. We are once again at the bottom of the steps looking at huge climb head. However this time we have the necessary experience to start anew. The following are some tips and general knowledge I have found useful to navigate this new ocean. Today’s I’ll focus on the things designers need to consider

1. The Alpha and Omega - Replicating the look of a website, cool interactive piece, or intricate montage are out of reach at moment but that doesn’t me it can’t be beautiful. For some it might mean embracing basic design practices, going ‘back to the cradle’ in a manner of speaking. The best tip I can give is to be mindfully your use of space, negative and positive.
2. Symmetry is the “Bee’s-knee” – Symmetry is fact of life, we are surrounded by it and sometimes we forget what the good it brings to the table. Aiming for symmetry will keep unexpected complications from rearing their head once your design has to be coded. Not taking this into consideration could cause you more trouble than it’s worth.
3. Simplicity – Drop shadows, gradient backgrounds, curved corners are all great features that can make a design stand out but when it comes HTML email’s going forward are more trouble than they are worth.
   • Drops shadows typically extend the area of a design, even if the design does not intend to or considers it.
   • Gradients are not feasible anymore because some Outlook 07, the target standard for HTML emails, does not support the background images through CSS and the background attribute in elements will indiscriminately repeat the image. Gmail and other web mail clients strip or ignore some inline CSS properties and style defined in a style block.
   • • Rounded corners, unlike the previous features is less trouble to implement but still posses a fair amount of challenges. I part of this entry I will cover how to get curved corners to play nice in the development phase, but for this section my advice is to avoid combining gradients and/or drop shadows with rounded corners; that would be a recipe for trouble.
4. “Get it Done, Designers” - Tim Gun’s famous phrase from the “Project Runway” TV series conveys all that need to be said. Always listen to a well dressed man and you can do no wrong! All kidding aside, creating successful HTML email’s going forward will require an even closer partnership between designers and developers. Both sides will have to make compromises but the end result will be something we can all be proud of.