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Speak to any graphic designer about designing for the Internet and I’m sure you’ll hear stories of frustration, agony and despair. Melodramatic? Maybe — but the goal of rendering beautiful designs in varying environments on differing systems can be incredibly challenging for even the most experienced designers.

Designing for email has its own additional challenges. There are many ways your recipients can access email — from Outlook to Gmail — and each render HTML in their own unique way. With this in mind, how do you design an email campaign that is well laid out, professional, prompts user engagement and works across the majority of systems?

Here is part 1 of our 2-part guideline to best practice email design:

Know your audience

While you will never know the exact viewing environments of each individual, you should know enough about the general recipient-base in order to make some assumptions. For example, in the professional services market most recipients are likely to view email via various versions of Outlook. For business to consumer campaigns, your recipient base may contain a larger share of web-mail viewers (Gmail, Yahoo! Etc.). Knowing your audience allows you to tailor your HTML accordingly.

Understanding Outlook

The release of Microsoft Outlook 2007 brought new changes to the way email is rendered (i.e. the way it is displayed) and a new set of rules for coding HTML. The move from Explorer to Word for rendering has brought with it a number of limitations to what can be done. Aside from simplification of style sheets (CSS), background images and forms no longer appear visible in the inbox. Be especially aware of overlaying text content on top of images, as these will no longer appear!