Tuesday 23 September 2008
Question Time
Last week I was lucky enough to be in the audience of Question Time when it came to Bournemouth after the Liberal Democrat conference. It was a small audience of no more than 70 people and we were allowed on set before the politicians arrived. I was looking out for the ‘smoke and mirrors’ and all the staged TV moments, but the programme was shot in one take and shot live, no questions were rehearsed or given to the panel.
The experience reminded me of what it is like in our own agency, long gone are the days of dazzling clients with our industry brand of ‘smoke and mirrors’, or rely on a few mouse clicks and standard templates, you have to tell it like it is, show originality, be honest, have a point of view and consistently deliver our product to a very high standard.
Now does that sound like our politicians?
The experience reminded me of what it is like in our own agency, long gone are the days of dazzling clients with our industry brand of ‘smoke and mirrors’, or rely on a few mouse clicks and standard templates, you have to tell it like it is, show originality, be honest, have a point of view and consistently deliver our product to a very high standard.
Now does that sound like our politicians?
Labels: design strategy
HTML emails
It could be said that one of the hardest jobs in web design at the moment is the task of creating HTML emails (or e-Flyers, EDMs and so on) in which the design and build works perfectly across all browsers, web-based email clients, computer-based email clients and operating systems. I will outline a couple of the more unknown problems I have found and possible workarounds for these problems.
Cellspacing in web-based email clients in Firefox for PC
So you've managed to build a HTML email using tables, even though you feel like you are leaping back towards the late 90s. It looks great in Outlook 2007 (a mammoth task just on its own) and seemingly on all of the popular email clients (Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Google Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Entourage). And yet, viewing it on Hotmail and Gmail in Firefox 3.0 on a PC completely strips all of the cellspacing with no explanation.
So there isn't full support for margin, padding or now cellspacing (cellpadding seems to work perfectly).
The workaround?
The only way I found to make this work was to use a spacer.gif (a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF image) and increase the width and height of the image to force table cells to create the illusion of cellspacing. I remember doing this kind of workaround 7-8 years ago!
Background images or floating images in Outlook 2007
For some unknown reason, instead of Microsoft using the Internet Explorer engine to parse HTML emails as they did in Outlook 2003, when it came to Outlook 2007 they decided to switch to an MS Word engine. This means very little support for HTML (and almost no CSS); the main problem being how you can get the most out of images in your designs.
Background-image is not supported. Background (the non-validating bygone property for tables or tds) is not even supported. And you definitely cannot float text around an image. What does this mean? Very structured tabular designs with structured tabular images.
There isn't one. Just make sure that every image can be in its exact place without overlapping text or other images, and you can work it into a table structure without the need for text to float around it. Good luck!
Cellspacing in web-based email clients in Firefox for PC
So you've managed to build a HTML email using tables, even though you feel like you are leaping back towards the late 90s. It looks great in Outlook 2007 (a mammoth task just on its own) and seemingly on all of the popular email clients (Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Google Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Entourage). And yet, viewing it on Hotmail and Gmail in Firefox 3.0 on a PC completely strips all of the cellspacing with no explanation.
So there isn't full support for margin, padding or now cellspacing (cellpadding seems to work perfectly).
The workaround?
The only way I found to make this work was to use a spacer.gif (a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF image) and increase the width and height of the image to force table cells to create the illusion of cellspacing. I remember doing this kind of workaround 7-8 years ago!
Background images or floating images in Outlook 2007
For some unknown reason, instead of Microsoft using the Internet Explorer engine to parse HTML emails as they did in Outlook 2003, when it came to Outlook 2007 they decided to switch to an MS Word engine. This means very little support for HTML (and almost no CSS); the main problem being how you can get the most out of images in your designs.
Background-image is not supported. Background (the non-validating bygone property for tables or tds) is not even supported. And you definitely cannot float text around an image. What does this mean? Very structured tabular designs with structured tabular images.
There isn't one. Just make sure that every image can be in its exact place without overlapping text or other images, and you can work it into a table structure without the need for text to float around it. Good luck!
Labels: HTML, web design
Monday 22 September 2008
A quick welcome
Welcome to the brand new EC Design and Marketing blog. Here we will be keeping you up-to-date with all of the goings on at EC, as well as offering some tips and advice from the worlds of design, web and advertising. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoy writing it.
Please feel free to visit the main EC website, where you can take a look at our portfolio and maybe even drop us a line to let us know what you think.
Please feel free to visit the main EC website, where you can take a look at our portfolio and maybe even drop us a line to let us know what you think.
Labels: EC