Has been fundamental to email from the very beginning. So why does it often feel like an afterthought? Much of the recent discussion about typography in email has focused on web fonts and fallbacks. It is not a surprise. Given the email community's longstanding plea for better css support in email clients, it's almost natural that we focus on our inability to display fonts consistently in a inbox to another. Hard chit adii pienaar's "Tough chit" maintains visual interest by paying special attention
To typography. I'm not saying this to downplay the importance of delivering on-brand email newsletters. However, after attending a talk by andy clarke at sydcss, I realized that the company mailing list challenge of making copy visually appealing on digital devices was basically to make environments like the browser and inbox follow basic rules. And, if web-savvy people like andy clarke are still fighting to make modern browsers obey the rules, there's probably little hope for reforming outlook and gmail. Marginal blessings the good news is that email client css support for the properties we need to create smooth text is, for the most part, rock solid. With some caveats,
Support for margin (as applied to <p> tags), text indentation (for leading), line height, and required properties for typographic emphasis are generally consistent, which means our real challenge as email designers is to apply it correctly. Reducing email typography to simply (albeit carefully) matching font sizes to line heights is, again, only a piece of the cake. Although we can control these variables, the more important issue is designing accommodating environments. Microsoft word and our own browsers have both made us oblivious to the typographic sins around us, including not aligning our bulleted lists properly. In short, bulleted lists are supposed