Design Guidelines

Here are some pointers for designing your email. Early warning: If you’re a seasoned
web designer, you’re not going to be happy with all the compromises and hacks you’ll
have to make when designing for email applications.
Set your width to about 500-600 pixels.
If you’ve ever worked on a website, you’re probably used to designing pages to fit in
800x600 pixel resolution screens, or maybe even 1024x768. But that won’t work when
you design HTML email. Most recipients will be looking at your email through their
“preview pane” which is usually a small portion of their available screen (see screenshot
below).
Above is a screenshot of an HTML email in Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane. Outlook is
maximized to full screen (1024x768 pixels), but as you can see, the preview pane is
only about 440 pixels wide. In AOL 9, the “preview pane” is only about 194 pixels wide,
then when you click “Full View,” it typically opens up a window that’s about 540 pixels
or so. This is why you shouldn’t design emails to be much larger than 600 pixels in
width.