rodriguezcommaj

It's a huge step forward. It effectively means that we will be able to do traditional responsive stuff using media queries but perhaps more importantly, we can stop having to use inline styles everywhere. That means a big reduction in duplicated code and HTML emails that are MUCH easier to maintain. The increase in efficiency will allow email people to focus on creating better content so that emails are more useful to people.

That's a good question. I'm not sure about StampReady, but Campaign Monitor has a few of the best email designers in the biz working there (namely Nicole Merlin and Stig Morten Myre) who strive for really robust templates. Nicole in particular has written about her approach (typically called 'hybrid' or 'spongey' development), which works without media queries. It's basically using fluid tables, max-width, and MSO conditional tables to get things working and is the best approach around these days. You can read more about it here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-pr...

I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.

You should look into http://www.stampready.net - along with Campaign Monitor's email builder (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/create-custom-email...), it's one of the best drag-and-drop tools for creating really good, responsive emails. The problem with any of these tools is that they still spit out sometimes convoluted code, but that can't really be avoided since they need to cover their asses in literally dozens of different popular email clients.

If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.

Great work, Matt. I think you guys did a great job with these, especially having multiple layouts for each template to handle different use cases. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that one layout works for every situation—it's nice to see you guys helping to remedy that misconception.

Chuffed to see you using Litmus, too!

Ink is cool. There are a surprising number of templates out there now, too. Brian Graves has a great site of resources with a template section at http://responsiveemailresources.com/

I also released one based on the template we use at Litmus to accompany an article in A List Apart. Article - http://alistapart.com/article/can-email-be-responsive Template - https://github.com/alistapart/salted

Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish in email these days. While there are still problem email clients when it comes to responsive (Gmail, the Gmail mobile app, some Android clients, and a few iOS clients like Mailbox), you can build responsive emails fairly easily.

While it's true that you need to rely on tables, some HTML attributes, and a lot of inline styles - we routinely use classes, media queries, and CSS3 in our emails at Litmus. We've even pulled off HTML5 video backgrounds and some cool stuff with CSS3 animations. All in email.

Outlook definitely has issues, more recently with rendering in Outlook.com, but they are known issues—most with quick fixes.

More importantly, there are a ton of great resources out there. At Litmus, we actually started a community around email design to help people learn and troubleshoot (https://litmus.com/community). If anyone's interested, here are some good email design resources:

Responsive Email Patterns - http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/ Responsive Email Resources - http://responsiveemailresources.com/ Action Rocket Labs blog - http://labs.actionrocket.co/ Campaign Monitor CSS Support Guide - https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ MailChimp Email Design Reference - http://templates.mailchimp.com/

Hell, I even wrote a book on responsive email design (http://modernhtmlemail.com).

Email is definitely its own, weird world - but it's a world that is improving and growing every day. More importantly, it's a world filled with dedicated and clever people that are refining techniques, building tools, and sharing knowledge to make working with email easier than ever.

The Zurb one is a cool start - you may also like Antwort - http://internations.github.io/antwort/ - and Brian Grave's Responsive Email Patterns - http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/

For general information, Anna Yeaman over at STYLECampaign made an amazing video on Responsive Email Design, a must-view if you're interested in the topic - http://stylecampaign.com/blog/2013/03/responsive-email-desig...

Shameless self promotion, I also wrote a book on the subject called Modern HTML Email - http://modernhtmlemail.com - good way to get into responsive email design and email marketing in general.

I'm actually the Community Manager at Litmus. If you still use the service and have issues, don't hesitate to shoot us an email at hello@litmus.com - we're always trying to improve the service and help out our customers.

There are a ton of email service providers out there. For that size of a list, you will probably be spending at least a little bit of money. My favorite ESP is CampaignMonitor - http://campaignmonitor.com - but a lot of people really like MailChimp, Emma, or CakeMail.

I would recommend doing two things to announce it - (1) Add something on the community site. If you have a sidebar or area on the front and other pages - add a section with a quick blurb on what it is along with a signup form. (2) If you have the community users' emails, send them an email with an invitation to sign up for the newsletter. Since they already signed up for the community - this would fall under the umbrella of transactional email - so you don't technically need permission from them to send them email - I just wouldn't use this list for the actual newsletter list - just to ask their permission to get on the newsletter list.

If users have a dashboard page or something similar, you can always make an announcement there as well. The main thing is that you want them to give you express permission to start sending them newsletters. Don't just start blasting to that list.

Having a plain text option is definitely an important part of email marketing. I still enjoy receiving HTML emails from certain companies and people - its usually an interesting web design niche and there are some cool designs out there.

To each his own, but HTML email marketing is still a BIG business.

There's a pretty interesting discussion of this going on over at Designer News:

https://news.layervault.com/stories/4266-deleted-my-portfoli...

Use a table within Bootstrap or start nesting the grid to achieve that result.

It basically means something that currently isn't your full-time gig (although I suppose someone could be independently wealthy and working on their own project full-time). I want to talk to people that are taking their free time and using it to build projects and be productive. The people that are scratching an itch and can't be stopped from building things. It would be amazing if some of these projects end up turning into companies and full-time jobs, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the end goal. I just want to interview people that are passionate about what they are doing and can't help doing it with the time they have.

Teams are more than welcome to email. The idea is more to celebrate the idea of working on something you love independently, showcase passion projects and things you can't stop yourself from building in your free time. If you've found people to work with you, all the better. Shoot me an email and let's chat.

Please bookmark! If you are working on some cool stuff, shoot me an email, now or when you launch.

Noted. I have been thinking about that a lot, actually. Just wanted to get something out there quick to get some feedback and start soliciting people for interviews. I have a few ideas for the actual launch (which should be in a few weeks) that will probably include a lighter theme to make reading a lot better. Thanks for the input!

There are a ton out there:

http://css-tricks.com

http://alistapart.com

http://smashingmagazine.com

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com

http://webdesignerwall.com

Lots of agencies and designers post some great articles and tutorials on their blogs as well, just look around. I usually find that the best way to discover new stuff is to hit the links of whoever is writing a tutorial you like. Check out personal sites, agency blogs where the authors work, etc.

Just keep your eyes open.

I have used both extensively on both personal and work-related projects. Both are great, but Foundation gets my vote as it is lighter and much easier to work with as a designer. With Bootstrap, you are pretty much stuck with that general look unless you want to do A LOT of work. You will end up looking like every other app out there using it.

With Foundation, it is much easier to override their styling and build something that is unique. You feel more like you are working WITH a framework, as opposed to working AGAINST one - which is how I feel using Bootstrap.

Either way, you can't go wrong, but if you value saving time by not overriding a million CSS rules when designing your site - go with Foundation.

I think it's less about selling snake oil than about exposing people to information and ebooks that are relevant to their interests. A book about using Sublime Text productively? What better place to post about it? Sure, it's good for sales, but it is also completely fitting for the readers of this site.

The site is Hacker News - not Programmer News. I understand that there is obviously a strong lean towards programming when thinking of hacking, but hacking can apply to broader topics than just programming. A lot of people are interested in eBooks and marketing and if the post helps you think about those things in a new manner and "hack" the methods of writing, publishing, and marketing your eBook, then I think it's a valid thing to post. If you check out the guidelines for posts on HN, you will see:

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I think that a lot of these posts will satisfy a ton of people's intellectual curiosity. If it didn't, why would it make it to the front page in the first place?

Not to mention that if you extrapolate some of the ideas found in these sorts of posts, you could potentially apply them to things like programming and startups. Seems like a beneficial thing to me to have on the site.

I won't go into whether or not some of these posts are that well written or that incisive, but I think a lot of people would agree that they belong here.

I wish they would have styled actual text for the header and footer logo/tagline. As it is, they are just huge images that do not scale AT ALL. I guess you could call this art-directed, but it seems sloppy to me.

Pretty sure it is intended. I refreshed a few times thinking that some stylesheets were missing or not loading properly. Definitely a bold direction...

I will add that I am loving seeing Kevin Cornell's illustrations at that size, though.

It may just need some getting used to, but at first glance - I am not digging it all that much. I understand the thinking behind content first and thinking outside of the "Desktop as "real design" mentality, but I feel like the desktop (and even iPad landscape) version now suffers due to that mentality. The shift of the menu and navigation to the bottom is also very annoying for finding other pages quickly - and I know I am going to miss the quick glance of multiple stories every other week on the home page. The old design was easy to digest and get a summary of what was in that issue and whether or not I wanted to read it. This version, not so much.

I like the idea of moving in the "boldy art-directed magazine" direction, so maybe it will just take some time to get there and feel comfortable in that role. But for now I feel like it is forcing a responsive, mobile design at larger sizes and the layout suffering for it.

All that said, I adore the content (usually) and look forward to what they have prepared for the future. Like any drastic change, I am sure I will grow accustomed to it and will stop whining about it in a month or two.

OP Here - A programmer friend and I made and released this recently, thought some of you might find it interesting. I did all of the artwork and design for it, he handled the initial concept and programming.

Question is - I helped make the damned game and I can't seem to figure out the underlying strategy. Can any of you? There has got to be a way to solve it to get high scores, but no luck on my end and my buddy isn't giving away any secrets.

Thoughts?

Aside from the innovative product, the new Ableton site is pretty fantastic. Responsive, bold, very well done. Love to see this great company on HN.

Still new to some of this stuff, but I can take a crack at it. Would definitely be excellent practice to figure out what's going on in vanilla js. I'll post it if I can do it.

Thanks for the catch, updated.

Fairly new to Javascript and jQuery, just scratching an itch for some sliding divs on my own. Everything (all 33 lines of it) written by me. I may eventually develop it into a full jQuery plugin, but with some more experience under my belt first.

I dislike this for one main reason: Scrolling. HN as it stands now is nice and compact, easy to scan through stories without the need to scroll a page. This breaks that, which creates an obstacle that isn't necessary.

Also, when you select another page, like "new", then the active color of the navigation makes that link invisible.

Overall it just feels like adding white space for the sake of adding white space to try to achieve something that feels modern, but in reality inhibits useability.