Tailgate is a new company that, among other things, has developed a pretty nifty “Buy Now” feature for banner ad campaigns, which doesn’t necessitate clicking through to the site. (They claim they’re the first to do this within an online ad.)

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http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18187.asp

From imedia Connections

This is an Email that I wrote working at Brooks Bell – where I am currently at – stating my opinions on the usefulness of blogs and I think the points are salient for ones own personal development in any given field
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One of the harder things we do as designers working in the medium of Banner Ads, is make them compelling while still fitting the file size requirements. They tend to have file size limitations as small as 25k to 30k.
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I have been trying to come up with a system to deal with Q&A side of the job of being a desginer.

The strategy came up with a check list that breaks down creative into five sections.
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www.colourlovers.com

COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing
by Bryan Eisenberg (Author), Jeffrey Eisenberg (Author), Lisa T. Davis (Contributor)

Although this is more like Book of the Quarter – what are your thoughts?

View of Email with Images Enabled in Gmail

A comment on the most current marketing email from Nike

I think it is successful in terms of visuals – it is beautifully designed and tempting. The user experience is good in that each of the links takes you to the specific product or category you clicked on.
Where I think it fails is the fact that with images blocked, none of the message of the email gets through. The email is all image without any system text. The only information you get about what the email features without the images is from the Subject Line. One could argue that rather like Apple, Nike is a singularity in terms of brands, they provoke very positive feelings and people want to take the time to download the image in the email.
But I still think there is room from improvement, with good use of system text for messaging and navigation purposes and background colors in .html for design one can still have a compelling email , so that if the email is something I am interested in or not I can make the choice without having to download the images.

A Comment on the Coding of the Email
It’s just a one large image email (the first BIG no-no in email marketing), done all in image maps (where you define a hotspot of an image that’s clickable. That’s the 2nd BIG mistake. They did put ALT text in their image maps, but as we can see, email programs handle image maps differently and some don’t display the ALT text in the image maps. Some email programs ignore image maps altogether, so in those email programs this email would be completely non-functioning.