Designing E-Mailers

If you're in web design chances are you'll need to design a promotional email at some point. If you think designing for the web can be frustrating, just try designing for email clients with limited, quirky, or non-existant CSS support. Smashing Magazine has an article on approaches to try, but a critical paragraph contains information everyone needs to know--you should design emails using tables in order to get correct display. As the article says, "keep it simple"--don't rely on advanced CSS techniques.

"Emails are coded using tables, so we have to create design sketches and Photoshop mock-ups with table-based layouts in mind. Keep it simple, and have a clear idea of where to position the gradients and how they will behave (say, if we want a gradient to expand horizontally to fit the viewport’s width)."