Web and graphic design in Ho chi Minh City

HTML Newsletter Design

Designing a newsletter was a first for me . Very interesting job with a content in collaboration with my colleague from Phoenix Voyages. This project has two phases. The first step is the 4 PDF pages designed to be downloaded from the website and for viewers that do not have HTML mails enabled on their mail client.

From there come the second step of the design. The HTML version of the newsletter. The HTML version do not have to exceed 500Ko. It is the limit i think a mail must stay below to avoid surcharging client mailboxes.
Besides, the HTML newsletter is rarely read completely. Therefore, text and visual together have to bring the most important information fast. According to statistics, only 2% – 5% of clients read newsletter they receive.

Our mail boxes are overloaded with those kind of E-Newsletter and eventually too much information kill information. I believe that is where ” information design” is important and where i engaged to provide in this work a suitable visual organization.

The technical difficulty that neophytes are not aware of is mail client compatibility. If IE6 pain to code for is well know, his little brother MS Outlook 2007 walked on the sames steps. Yes, it is even worse as MS outlook is using MS word rendering to render mail.

Nonsense? yes! as mails are basically HTML, it is using a spoon to eat a steak. MS outlook only support little CSS and does not support background image of any sort.

I stop here with technical considerations that could be a future blog subject and show you the 4 pages of the PDF pilot newsletter: