Email Newsletters are about 1625% harder than you think they would be. They are tricky. One, they have to fit on all the browsers and platforms and they have to work on all the different email clients. Two, they are written in both the latest HTML/CSS and a very-old 90s version of non-CSS-table-based HTML. That's right: you have to write code for the past and for the present. In one file.

Take Outlook for instance. It's an industry standard. It's the predominantly used email service on campus. Yet Outlook, for all their industry dominance, uses Microsoft Word to render their email. Word. To render email. Like I said, HTML-formatted email are tricky!

For this project I started with an existing template and then customized it enough that it has definitely taken its own life and flavor. I knew I didn't have time do do all of the coding myself. By starting with a template, I could then customize it to really fit our unique needs.

Even though I started with a template, I've had to go through every line of code because it turns out that the template didn't behave well across all the browsers and applications, either.

Below is a screenshot of the In Touch Newsletter we sent out in April 2017 using the template.

Next is the all-styles-included template I created. This shows all of the available styles we can use in the email. It can be mix and match as long as the header, intro, outro, and footer don't change.