Useful Web Design E-Mail Newsletters
There are thousands of good websites out there offering web design and development tips. It’s a bit much to sift through in most cases. There must be an easier way. Enter the email newsletter. What could be better than sitting back and waiting for the newest design and development news to be delivered to your inbox? Here is a rather short list of great newsletters devoted to web development, design, and related topics.
You may be interested in the following useful posts:
- 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires
- 45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories
- Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers
- 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
BlueVertigo Newsletter
BlueVertigo regularly updates its list of resources related to design and web-development and informs its subscribers about recent updats and new resources. Always a very good source of new useful resources for web developer’s toolbox.
Laura Carlson’s Web Design Update Newsletter
Laura Carlson’s legendary Web Design Update newsletter sends news, information and tutorials about web design and development. The Web Design Update is a plain text email digest dedicated to disseminating news and information about web design and development with emphasis on elements of user experience, accessibility, web standards and more. Whenever new articles are linked on the Web Design Reference site, a Web Design Update newsletter message is sent to the listserv. The newsletter is sent out weekly.
Ben Hunt’s Web Design Newsletter
If you’ve never heard of Web Design From Scratch, you’re really missing out. Even if you’ve heard of it, did you know they had a newsletter? Ben Hunt’s Web Design Newsletter offers up great monthly web design information and tips. The July 2009 issue offered up some great info on white on white web design, Google Website Optimizer, semantic CSS, and a link to a free ebook.
Web Smart Newsletter
Web Smart newsletters are written for advertising agencies to keep them in the loop on what’s happening on the Web. These newsletters are never technical or buzz-word enriched; instead they cover online trends that impact marketing such as: web technologies, search optimization and marketing, website applications, design issues, new media, and online advertising.
.Net Magazine’s Newsletter
.Net Magazine is one of the most popular web design magazines out there. While the magazine is paid, they offer a free email newsletter. It offers up content similar to that found in the magazine and on their website, covering all aspects of web design news.
Bokardo
Bokardo Design is a social web design company that offers a newsletter. They cover social design issues including influence, reputation, community, behavior and their relationship with different aspects of design. You can view their full archives on their website, along with signing up via email or RSS.
SitePoint Newsletters
SitePoint offers up four newsletters, each cover a different aspect of web design and development.
Tribune
The Tribune is a weekly newsletter that offers general web design news, with a heavy focus on the business of web design. Their archives are all available online, with each issue focusing on a different theme based on the main article (like #456: “Keep that Job!” or #448: “Nifty Gadgets for Your Consideration”).
Tech Times
The Tech Times is a biweekly newsletter that offers much more technical articles than the others, focused on topics like CSS, HTML, jQuery, PHP, and other programming languages. Their newsletters are all available online, each with a different theme centered around their main article (like #228: “What’s So Bad About CSS Frameworks?” and #229: “More Crimes Against Hypertext”).
Community Crier
The Community Crier offers information from SitePoint’s community forums and community.
SitePoint Design View
Design View is a monthly newsletter that offers design news, tools, and tips for web design. They focus on providing useful information to web designers, but for the most part it’s less technical than the “Tech Times” mentioned above. Issues are themed based on the lead article (like #52: “Coda, CS4, & New Photoshop Tricks” or #48: “HTML Email and the Legion of Doom”).
AskTog
AskTog is a newsletter focused on interaction design solutions from the Nielsen Norman Group. They cover topics like inclusive design for people with disabilities and technology comparisons (the most recent was comparing the first generation Kindle with the iPhone/iPod Touch). There newsletters don’t appear every month, but they do make their archives available online.
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
Alertbox is Jakob Nielsen’s regular, biweekly column on web usability topics. He’s been writing it since 1995, and all of the archives are available online. Recent topics have included Mobile Usability, Social Networking on Intranets, and Respect for Usability. It’s a must-have resource for web designers and developers alike.
SiteProNews
SiteProNews offers email updates about new content. They cover a wide variety of web design, marketing, and SEO topics. Their articles are all available directly on their website, as well.
Boston Interactive’s Newsletter
Boston Interactive offers a free newsletter that covers a variety of web design and development topics. Recent topics they’ve covered include articles about Bing, Twitter, and crowdsourcing. Their archives are available online.
Bonus: Designer In Action’s Newsletter (German)
This newsletter is in German but covers a variety of web design topics. The weekly newsletter sends out useful tools, resources and links to freebies. Previous articles have covered iPhone apps for designers, fonts, and upcoming events.
Further Resources
Use the tools below to create your own email newsletter.
- Best Practices for Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery
Tips to make sure your emails get delivered. - How To Code HTML Email Newsletters (All New Version)
Shows how to format HTML emails using a combination of tables and CSS. - How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
A tutorial from Sitepoint. - 42 HTML email design resources
A summary of the best HTML email design resources, covering overviews, guidelines, standards, templates, checklists, design tools, galleries and more. - The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email
A guide to creating attractive HTML emails. - 30+ Free HTML Email Templates—Tried & Tested
A collection of free email templates from Campaign Monitor. - Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off
An older article from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
Related posts
You may be interested in the following useful posts:
sayan mukherjee
August 12th, 2009 10:42 amthanks for sharing…love this.
Roy Vergara
August 12th, 2009 10:45 amgomediazine.com is a good one too
Jourdan
August 12th, 2009 10:57 amThank you for the information! Very helpful!
kibal4iw
August 12th, 2009 11:08 amThank you. Very interesting. Please note
Bim
August 12th, 2009 11:13 amI don’t tend to receive email newsletters anymore.. just follow rss feeds. Anyway might be good to show examples of beauitiful email newsletters rather than where to get information about web design and development news which we can pick up from news blogs anyway. Just my opinion… Thanks for writing.
Jai
August 12th, 2009 11:17 amI wonder how the Smashing Magazine email newsletter will look? :-D
Mike
August 12th, 2009 11:27 amI wonder how some of the more advanced email newsletters look in some email clients. I’ve personally had a difficult time creating more than a basic layout and having it work in the majority of email clients.
Brandon Jones
August 12th, 2009 11:45 amAny chance of an article detailing resources for making our own html newsletters?
MS
August 12th, 2009 11:50 amI agree with #8 Brandon Jones – an article about creating HTML newsletters would be great.
Matt Mickiewicz
August 12th, 2009 12:03 pmThanks for including SitePoint’s four email newsletters!
Great list.
Josh Tummel
August 12th, 2009 12:45 pmI agree with Mike above. No idea how you can achieve a good looking newsletter without basically making the whole thing an image. Since CSS can’t be used, and only really dumbed down HTML works, it’s pretty much impossible to make a complicated structure.
A newsletter design guide would be a huge plus.
tx8
August 12th, 2009 12:56 pmNeh nobody read newsletter anymore.
Chris Butler
August 12th, 2009 12:57 pmThanks for including Newfangled’s WebSmart newsletter in the list! The company’s founder, Eric Holter, began writing them monthly in 2001 until I took over in 2008. Our goal has always been to write primarily to our audience of creative agencies, with whom we partner to build “better websites for their clients.”
Above, @Mike asked about how the newsletters look in different email clients. This has been something we’ve found to be especially tricky. We use our own newsletter component that is tied directly in to our site’s content management system, a tool we also offer to our clients, so we’ve had a lot of experience with the development side of newsletter campaign software. Even so, we’ve never been able to guarantee that the template appears *exactly* how it’s intended in every webmail, mobile or desktop email client. There are just too many out there! We do try to ensure performance in the major clients, like Outlook, MacMail, Gmail, etc.
- Chris Butler, Vice President, Newfangled
Bob
August 12th, 2009 1:05 pmDon’t forget my article on Nettuts.com
6 Easy Ways To Improve Your HTML Emails
fall3n
August 12th, 2009 1:32 pmFor those of you looking for good HTML newsletter resources, Campaign Monitor always has great guides and information. Here’s one e-mail design guideline article. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/
Also, their list of e-mail clients and their supported CSS is an excellent piece of reference material. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
fall3n
August 12th, 2009 1:33 pm^^ And no I don’t work for them, I just have a number of years of experience with HTML newsletters :)
Jakob Nielsen
August 12th, 2009 3:04 pmThank you for including the Alertbox newsletter. I have actually written several newsletters about newsletters (circular, I know), based on our usability testing of 228 different email newsletters:
Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion
Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength
Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off
Case studies from 2004: Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated and Newsletter Usability: Can a Professional Publisher Do Better?
Anrkist
August 12th, 2009 3:29 pm#8 Mike – Stick to the basics for email. Campaign Monitor has a pretty slick articles and tips section.
Connor Katz
August 12th, 2009 3:35 pmThis is a nice list, but with RSS and now with Twitter, does anyone really subscribe to newsletters anymore?
ronihind
August 12th, 2009 4:35 pmHA! no.6 – nice one
alanc
August 12th, 2009 4:51 pmVery generous of you to promote the competition!
I’m old school enough that I prefer to receive periodic messages in my Inbox, rather than having to keep my eye on a series of RSS feeds.
The one thing that Smashing Magazine has always glaringly lacked is an email digest
Blue Vertigo
August 12th, 2009 5:18 pmCameron, thnaks for your support! :)
yoxx
August 12th, 2009 9:22 pmthanks for sharing…
Luis Lopez
August 12th, 2009 11:03 pmThe .Net magazines newsletter is my favorite is the best design of the list, I found some newsletter really ugly sometimes, why client don’t invest on this kind of marketing if it could be really effective.
All for Design
August 13th, 2009 12:34 amVery useful, thanks :)
tom
August 13th, 2009 3:56 amWonderful list, thank you!
Niall McKenna
August 13th, 2009 5:25 amslightly off topic but would any of smashing’s writers be able to compile an article on effective HTML Email design and development.
I would love to see an article of this nature. cheers as always!
Victoria
August 13th, 2009 5:57 amCameron,
Thank you so much for including Boston Interactive’s newsletter in this list! We are truly honored. We’ve been sending out our monthly newsletter for years and are big believers in the medium. Keep an eye out for the next newsletter – launching at the end of the month – as we will be announcing some big news and a fresh new design!
Sean McCambridge
August 13th, 2009 7:20 amYeah, I thought it would be nice to get some tips on writing those dreaded HTML emails. That’s what I was expecting to find here. Ah, well.
AS
August 13th, 2009 8:21 ami always thought photojojo was a fantastic newsletter.
Cassie
August 13th, 2009 11:21 amKeep in mind that not every designer designs for a tech-savvy audience. I’d bet the majority don’t. I design HTML newsletters for an older customer base, and I guarantee you (based on subscribes–or lack thereof) that they do not use RSS! On the other hand, I have a pretty high open rate on the emails we send out to 30,000 subscribers each month. Use the best tool for your audience, not just the tool YOU like the best.
Thanks for the list, I needed something fresh in my inbox!
matt
August 13th, 2009 1:43 pmHow can you trust a newsletter on design when the design of the newsletter itself is so basic?
The idea of having the information constantly pushed to me when I can choose go to view the website articles whenever I want feels like opt-in SPAM. What’s a web browser for?
Note: Talking of really annoying SPAM – the book subscription corner peel makes it impossible to use the search (on some pages).
Jojje
August 14th, 2009 12:01 amFrankly I think that your collection is somewhat limited. A beautiful example of what you can achieve with basic html is the MyFonts newsletter.
Floris Fiedeldij Dop
August 14th, 2009 2:56 amGreat, newsletters are always hard, especially when you are dealing with 250,000+ member communities. Seeing how bigger sites deal with this and what is out there, is really nice. A few more SM Newsletter Articles might help everybody. Excellent coverage
Jessica
August 14th, 2009 7:49 amA lot of those kinda sucked :P IMO
Campaign Monitor has a fantastic gallery of newsletters I highly recommend checking out. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/
Christina
August 15th, 2009 1:13 pmThanks for this, great list! I know most are using RSS feeds but still nice to get a well designed email on the topic we love to entice us to visit their sites and read more.
I would definitely recommend Ben Hunt’s site Web Design From Scratch!
Carlos
August 16th, 2009 11:57 pmSitepoints newsletters are completely useless! As already stated campaign monitor are good.
Michiel
August 17th, 2009 2:46 amWhat would be really helpfull is to know a bit more about email sending engines. I have started developing a site, but how should is send and gather these email adresses. What are good systems on your own site, things to mind when doing it yourself. And what hosted services could i use? Would be great addition to this article!
Sam Granger
August 17th, 2009 4:01 amSahme you didn’t add Veer.com’s newsletter, I received one recently and it was absolutely beautiful!
Fabiano
August 17th, 2009 5:23 amWhat could be better than sitting back and waiting for the newest design and development news to be delivered to your inbox?
RSS.
Nouman Zakir
March 30th, 2010 6:45 amThanks Cameron for sharing this wonderful list. Some websites prefer to use pdf newsletters instead of html, I wonder why they do that?
John
April 16th, 2012 5:35 pmGreat list! I particularly enjoy the Sitepoint newsletters. Another one I’ve recently stumbled into is http://www.webdesignemail.com which is new but looks pretty solid.