Although this works nicely, I’ve encountered many instances of email messages being sent to spam folders as a result of this character triggering the alert for a Russian character set. It’s not a risk worth taking.Īvoid special characters: I’ve experimented with the use of ■ to create solid squares as separators between text. I usually set the font color to a light gray for these pipes.Īvoid white fonts: Perhaps you were thinking of simply coloring the separator pipes white, thus having them “disappear”? That works, but setting font colors to white (or even something else that’s super light) can be a spam trigger. The simplest solution, and one you’ve undoubtedly come across, is to use a pipe (|) to create the desired separation: Tel: (414) 473-6812 | Mobile: (414) 988-3211 | Fax: (414) 473-6819įrom a design standpoint, the pipe is generally acceptable to most graphic designers and marketing people. This will work fine, but carries two potential drawbacks – some potential increase in your spam score, and more graphics showing up as attachments in emails. One solution is to insert a white or transparent spacer graphic in between the text you wish to separate. You’ll be left with just one, and hence your signature will render with a single space between text entries. Microsoft Word, Outlook’s editor, will strip out all but the first of these s (note: the use of won’t help). The natural programming inclination is to simply string together a series of non-breaking spaces (for example, ) to achieve the spacing you want. Spacing between text: As hard as it is to believe, if you’re designing email signatures for use in Microsoft Outlook you may not be able to accomplish spacing of this nature: Tel: (414) 473-6812 Mobile: (414) 988-3211 Fax: (414) 473-6819 Make sure you input values into the height and width attributes in your img tag: įinally, I recommend that you always use GIF graphics. Next, you’ll want to display your logo at 100% - do not allow the logo to be shown at any other size it will always look bad if you do. Make sure you create a scaled-down version of your logo that looks clean and sharp. For a square, round, or vertically oriented logo, I’d expect the height to be from 70 to 90 pixels. As a rule of thumb, I’d expect a horizontally oriented logo, such as the Vega Consulting logo, to be 150 to 250 pixels in width. The final size will vary depending upon your logo and your signature design. First, start with a good, high-resolution copy of your logo, and then scale it down to the exact size you want to use in your email signature. There are three aspects to achieving an optimal display. In both versions, at the top is Vega Consulting’s full logo, shown actual size and beneath it is a snippet of the logo shown at a zoom of 1000%. The image below shows a clean and a pixelated version of a logo. Image pixelization: While some logos are more susceptible to pixelization than others, it’s always best to display a clean, unpixelized logo. If you like, you can grab the HTML markup for this signature. I’m not going to go through the markup line by line, but rather will touch on some of the things that are not so obvious, yet are critical to understand. The following graphic shows an example of a feature-rich email signature: Gmail ignored these refined techniques and simply inserted full s, thus opening up the line spacing more than intended. More refined spacing techniques were then applied to adjust the gap down to the various hyperlinks and then again down to the IFT12 tagline. This was formatted using straight s to create the carriage returns. You’ll notice that the top block of text – my name down through the phone numbers - remains intact in Gmail. The bottom graphic illustrates the rendering of this email signature in Gmail. The top graphic illustrates the intended design - the actual rendering of this email signature in Outlook. Gmail line spacing: Gmail renders all line breaks as full carriage returns. Now, though, email signatures need to be narrower, and more vertical in orientation – smart phones offer a limited viewing area and an overly wide email signature can lead to a messy layout Smart phones: Prior to smart phones, email signatures worked well with a horizontal aspect The goal was to allow them to be seen fully when an email message was viewed in the preview pane on a desktop.
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