Subtraction

I like the look. I don’t have an opinion on how successful the templates are at housing the information, though, because I haven’t thought enough about the content or its use.

But there are two things that I noticed immediately and that I admire:

1) The designs, like your work at the Times, efficiently leverage CSS’s basic effects to do the heavy lifting, without having to rely much on images. This seems somehow more “honest” to the medium, and leads to faster, simpler code too. Especially given the poor standards support in email clients, I imagine that whoever had to code your designs was very grateful for this.

2) I have a soft spot for single-column layouts. Especially in the vertical-scrolling-dominated medium that is the web, using only a single column creates a phenomenally-clear hierarchy and a visual restfulness that I love. Sure, that’s not appropriate in all cases, but what is.

The only critique I have is the use of flush-left, ragged-right text in an otherwise-centered layout. I suspect their was a reason for this decision, but it looks unbalanced to my eye, at least when there’s a lot of copy, as in the example on mailchimp.com. I think I would’ve tried justified type, which doesn’t seem like it would be problematic given the fairly-wide measure.

Btw, if you’re allowed to share, did MailChimp give you a brief on the “feel” they wanted, in order to make sure they didn’t get multiple templates which looked similar? Or did that just work itself out?

Hi, I checked your templates at MailChimp. The simplicity of the design makes it so elegant.

Loved the templates so much that I was inspired to sign up for a Mailchimp account after reading this post. Perfect timing actually, as I was finalizing my new site launch. Spent some time customizing a few of the elements and fast forward a few weeks later, I just sent out the email to some really positive responses. Link

Thanks and go Otis!!