When did you first connect the dots of typography and email?

The online fashion and home retail email campaigns I worked on in my first role as an email designer were by their very nature, image heavy. The use of HTML typography was encouraged for deliverability reasons, but was typically confined to a few short paragraphs, and the legal copy in the footer.

Mobile wasn’t a thing at the time, so templates were being designed and developed for desktop only. The approach was very much to design an email in Adobe Photoshop (based on the creative that had been already been designed for the direct marketing channel), ‘slice it and dice it’, and build it in Adobe Dreamweaver.

But I knew, if we were to progress, we needed to be much more fluid with email. Even though mobile wasn’t a thing yet, it soon would be, and that meant that typography had to be too — not static and embedded within an image, but fluid, responsive and HTML.

Can you talk about your subscribers-first approach? What’s at stake here for the average email marketer and reader?

I talk about putting the subscriber first, or #SubscriberFirst, a lot, and that’s because they are at the heart of my approach to email design and development.

My starting point is not to assume anything about them. I don’t assume they always have an internet connection. I don’t assume they have an email or webmail client that automatically displays images. I don’t assume they have images switched on. I don’t assume that if I were to embed typography within an image (which I wouldn’t of course), that it’d be legible enough for them to read on an iPhone Retina display.

Instead, I aim to make it as easy as possible for the marketing message—which has been deemed so important, it’s been thought worthy of being sent using the email channel—to have every opportunity of reaching the subscriber, so that they read it and engage with it — and crucially — without them having to do any ‘work’ whatsoever in the process.

So I guess, #SubscriberFirst means that I challenge the way I go about email design and development, removing anything that gets in the way of the message and the subscriber.

I use HTML typography so that:

The subscriber doesn’t have to select the ‘Click here to download pictures’ link.

Whatever device the subscriber is reading it on, it’s crisp and clear.

That the text automatically reflows on mobile, and they read the message, without having to scroll, pinch and zoom madly around.

The message appears instantly, before the images even get a chance to load.

This is really why marketers should devote more attention to their use of HTML typography, because if they don’t, they’re putting barriers in the way of their message and their subscriber, their customer, their supporter — and ultimately putting their email at a disadvantage.