Email design has remained fairly stagnent for many years now. For such a fast pace world like web & digital design, it is quite the feat. While the technical side of email design has not changed much, the content, design, and workflow sides of email have changed drastically. They have grown and matured and email is now one of the biggest, if not the biggest, communication tools we have. We seem to be reaching a happier balance of spam and actual informative marketing driven email. The ultimate balance being no spam, but that doesn’t seem likely.

A bunch of articles and discussions about email have been popping up recently. They talk about the technical aspects, design trends and so forth. It seems like email is becoming a hot button issue in the web community. With responsive design essentially the norm, and a light at the end of the tunnel for responsive images, maybe we need a new topic to jump on. Maybe email is the perfect next frontier.

Current email sucks

There is no other way to phrase it. It sucks. Becuase of decisions a few corporations made a couple decades ago we have been pretty much forced to hack our way through HTML email development. We still use tables for structure. We stick to a limited set of fonts. We can’t truly embrace the fluidity of the web. As cliché as it sounds creating emails is like creating a website 15 years ago.

There are a multitude of issues holding email back, but the core problems have not changed, the fragmentation of email apps and web mail apps and how they render HTML. Even google has not been doing us any favours with gmail, which does not support much HTML and CSS and overwrites many standard tags. These decisions were probably made to try and keep some semblance of consistency within their app, but these decisions are double edged swords. We are left with no standards and few best practices.

Where email needs to go

Proper HTML and CSS support and web standards

This is the obvious one. It’s pretty clear email would be a whole lot more enjoyable to work with if we could write clean, semantic HTML and CSS, and leverage all of the amazing things CSS can do for us.

Support for Media Queries

This is another big one. Media queries and responsive design have changed the way we think about web and the way we design websites. This same shift has started to bleed into email design, but with such poor support for media queries it’s not having the impact it should.

@font-face support

The support for @font-face, and thus opening up the doors to a wide selection of fonts and typography, is more or less resigned to apple mail. This would be a huge boost for the email design community and really change how we design and build email.

Wider image support

Image formats like SVG, which are gaining popularity, have actually surprising support in email but it could be better. Even animated gifs have spotty support. Essentially we are mostly resigned to using JPGs, which is probably fine for most use cases but I would still like to see deeper support for other image types.

Javascript

Well, no actually. Javascript has been omitted from email apps for good reason: security. Email is a communication tool and the lack of interactivity is actually one of its biggest hindrances. Something to fill in the gap and provide interactivity could create another dimension to email design but this is more of a nice-to-have.

There are plenty more improvements we could make to email. If you have anything in mind, please let us know in the comments.

What’s happening now

There are some people and organizations doing some hard work to push email forward. Most notably is the Email Standards Project which you should visit if you are interested in email standards.