Email Design Podcast #83: Litmus Community Q&A Rapid Fire

In the 83rd episode of The Email Design Podcast, Kevin Mandeville and Jason Rodriguez answer recent questions from the Litmus Community in a rapid fire format, including topics on designing in the browser, media query support on Android, bulletproof buttons, and more. Be sure to follow along and join in the discussion on Twitter using #EmailDesignPodcast.

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In this episode:

• (1:08) What’s your approach to email design: concept first or straight to code? There’s no right answer, it comes down to what’s best for your workflow. We prefer designing in the browser using dev tools for quick prototyping.
• (5:22) Media queries in Android 5.0 and 6.0 aren’t working: For Android 5.1 and above, the default installed mail app is the Gmail app (except for a couple of vendors like Samsung who have their own bespoke client) which does support media queries. Android 4.4 and below used the native email app of the Android OS which supported media queries. While it’s not the default installed email app anymore, Android still provides a vanilla version of its mail app that vendors can customize to their needs. This vanilla version of the Android email app  does not support media queries on Android 5.1 and above. Check out The Ultimate Guide to Email on Android, 3 Keys to Understanding Email on Android, and [Webinar] Everything You Need to Know About Gmail Rendering to learn more.
• (8:28) Can you import video into an Outlook HTML template? Outlook on Windows uses Microsoft Word as a rendering engine and does not support video. Outlook for Mac uses WebKit as a rendering engine, however, and supports video. It’s best to send email as pure HTML through an email service provider instead of sending email campaigns directly through Outlook.
• (10:15) SFR.fr isn’t centering my images: Always make sure you have align=”center” on your table cells, but also include margin: 0 auto; on the image styling to ensure it gets centered in SFR.fr.
• (13:16) Featured Jobs: Marketing Automation Specialist at Republic Wireless | Email Developer at Holiday Extras | Sr. Email Developer at Pierry, Inc. | Email Designer / Developer at ITCUK
• (15:28) Can’t get app modules to display inline: The simplest answer is to put each icon in a 2×1 table with the images in their own cells or put them into two separate tables that align next to each other.
• (22:05) Border radius on bulletproof buttons: There are several ways to implement bulletproof buttons with a border radius. For the most design control, we recommend using buttons.cm as this will render with a border radius even in Outlook 2007-2016. We also recommend reading A Guide to Bulletproof Buttons in Email Design to learn about the padding + border-based approach. Stig Morten Myre also has another great technique that uses just a link tag which is the simplest and most minimal approach.
• (17:39) Outlook iOS and Android apps are not responsive Stay tuned for updates on Litmus’ Twitter and our blog post on Outlook apps media queries—we expect full support to return soon.

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