This Month in Community: Gmail and Responsive Design, Animation, and Cool Emails

The Litmus Community is humming along nicely! Amidst the latest Community Contests and people troubleshooting frustrating bugs, Community members are busy helping each other out and thinking deeply about the state of email design.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, here’s what happened this month in the Community.

Gmail and Responsive Design

Community member Sam Sexton started a heated debate around what responsive design is and how it relates to Gmail (which technically doesn’t support true responsive design). Sam boils it down to:

In 2015 responsive means Gmail-first. It means designs that are built with the limitations in mind.

He raises an interesting point: Gmail is a huge platform and will be growing as the Gmail app becomes the de facto email client for Android devices. A lot of people talk about responsive design but downplay the limitations of Gmail (namely not supporting CSS and media queries).

How are you dealing with Gmail, responsive design, and not going insane? And what can we, as a community, do to make email design better? Weigh in on this important topic.

Animating for Email

Peter Biolsi asked the question: how do you animate? We’ve written before about using animated GIFs in campaigns, and touched a bit on how to actually create them. There are a lot of different ways to create animations (and a few ways to actually include them in an email).

What applications and techniques do you use to animate for email campaigns? Photoshop, After Effects, something else entirely? Let the Community know. Brownie points for writing up a tutorial on your process, too.

The Coolest Emails

Ted Goas, looking for inspiration, asked Community members to post some examples of the coolest emails they’ve seen recently. Apparently a lot of people are sending some cool campaigns. The Community was quick to reply with tons of cool, real world examples. Hopefully some of them will help Ted convince web developers that there’s a lot possible with email design.

Have any favorite email campaigns? Share them with Ted and the rest of the Community.

Join the Community Today

There is a ton more happening in the Community than what’s described here. Keep up with the latest news, techniques, and tools by joining the Litmus Community today. It’s free to join and filled with the best minds in email marketing.

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