Making Invitations Look Good
pingg Designer Series: Carlyle Chaudruc
One of the philosophies that guides pingg is that aesthetics matter. When our hosts send invitations to an event, whether the event is personal or professional, casual or formal, the style and presentation of the actual invitation matters. From the start, pingg has focused on creating a system that would let us design invitations that stand out from the rest of the online crowd. For us, that means that the email invitations we send need to look their best, but also be highly functional.
From the standpoint of functionality, we include all the critical details of the event in the email message. Guests who receive invitations via pingg are not left wondering about the location or date of an event. pingg invitations also offer guests the ability to RSVP directly from the email, without taking a detour to load up a web browser. Of course there is a rich set of features on the web invitation, and sooner or later most guests will visit the web invitation, but pingg doesn’t think we should force people to go out of their way to find details.
Improving the functionality of our invitations was in many ways the easy part. Making the invitations look good has been a much larger project, and one that is still very much ongoing. This may get a little technical, so please bear with me or skip away if this makes your eyes glaze over. Every email client renders (that’s a technical term for decode and display) emails slightly differently. Each email client shows images and colors differently, and sets the text size and positioning in it’s own unique way. There are a huge number of email clients out there, and the number is growing. There is Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Apple Mail, gMail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and an almost infinite number of other webmail services. Smartphones like Blackberry, iPhone, and Palmpilots are also in the mix. Each and every one of these clients renders emails slightly differently. And to make matters even more difficult, each version of each email clients has it’s own unique quirks as well. Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 are as different as Outlook and gMail are different — family trees don’t guarantee similarity. Why does this matter you may ask? Looking good means looking reasonably consistent across all these clients. That’s a lot of work, and it’s very, very finicky. It’s easy to compensate for a quirk in one software package, but when we do that we have to make sure we don’t create a problem in another one.
A little while ago we discovered that our pingg gallery invitation templates were not being rendered properly in Outlook 2007. They looked great in Outlook 2003, and in all the other common email readers, but for some reason Outlook 2007 simply refused to render the email invitations as intended. In Outlook 2007, the background color of the invitation was being displayed, with the invitation text displayed as well. However the image was not being displayed. Without the image, the invitations look to put it bluntly totally broken. This as not an acceptable state of affairs. We’ve been working an a solution for several months now, and although it feels like eternity, the light at the end of the tunnel is finally visible. We now have a solution in place, and are working through the task of applying the fix to each and every one of our 400 or so gallery templates. It’s a slow process, since our designers have to spend personal time on each to be sure that the conversion process results in a perfect invitation. We think it’s worth the effort. We now anticipate that every template will be replaced with a new Outlook 2007 friendly template early next week, and we think they look better than ever. We certainly hope you’ll agree.
This is a the first post of a (semi) technical nature. Expect to see more along the line, as we continue to blog about whatever relevant topics are on our minds.
Matt Harrop
Co-Founder
