Krop Newsletter

24. May 2007.

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I’m honored to present the latest project we did with Patrick Riley from Vantageous. These guys are doing some really cool stuff at the moment (shhh… I’m not allowed to say a word about anything) and while Patrick and Jason Kristofer are delivering mind-blowing designs, Beau Hartshorne is dealing with the back-ends and the databases. In the last few projects, we helped with markup and CSS.

So far, in Vantageous related projects we worked exclusively with tableless layouts (in fact, I dont’t think I can count more then five table based sites I’ve been working on in my entire life), but now we have something that simply wouldn’t work without tables – the Krop HTML newsletter (see screen shot).

All you need to know about developing HTML newsletters, can be found at Campaign Monitor Blog. I highly recommend the article Optimizing CSS presentation in HTML emails.

We could have deliver fully blown colorful and semantically correct newsletter to CSS capable clients only (and a crippled version for everyone else), but we instead decided to create layout with tables which work in almost all the clients on the market with basic HTML support (if interested in the code view source).

Marko Dugonjić is a designer specialized in user experience design, web typography and web standards. He runs a nanoscale user interface studio Creative Nights and organizes FFWD.PRO, a micro-conference and workshops for web professionals.

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Follow @markodugonjic

Chris Moritz
001—2007.05.24.16:09

I’d be curious to see how it looks with images turned off in a preview pane. Gorgeous as it stands in any case.

Rogier
002—2007.05.25.14:00

I’d be curious to see how it looks in Lotus Notes ;)

marko
003—2007.05.25.16:04

@Rogier: I’m curious, too. You sound like a guy that’s well informed about the Lotus Notes issues. It would be awesome if you could test it and help us all better understand constrains when developing HTML e-mails.

Sean Fraser
004—2007.05.27.00:47

Why was the decision made to use inline CSS styles?

Rogier
005—2007.05.27.14:31

@Marko: untill Lotus Notes 8 comes out, which has a better support for html/css, I’d suggest adding a link at the top of your html e-mail with which leads to an online version of your newsletter.

From Campain Monitor’s blog:

What can I say, it aint pretty this year. Basically, you’ll notice a lot more crosses in the Outlook 2007 column than the 2003 column. The combination of Lotus Notes and Outlook 2007 basically leave the CSS layout option for dead. It’s tables and basic CSS for the PC based email environments unfortunately.

@Sean: if you read some of the articles at campaign monitor’s blog, you’ll quickly learn that tables and inline styles are unfortunately the way to go for html e-mails, especially with webbased mail applications in mind.

marko
006—2007.05.27.17:35

Rogier, thanks for the tip. The newsletter archive is aready under development, so basically with the next newsletter we will probably add the ‘view this newsletter online’ link.

Sean Fraser
007—2007.05.30.05:46

Rogier, Thanks; I read the articles. And, they caused me to remember some other articles I didn’t read but have now read.

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