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Pictures and Fonts in Email

Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 7:40 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Someone asked if she should include a picture of herself in the signature line of her email. I wrote back advising against it. Not everyone uses Outlook plus using an image in the signature adds weight to the email, which makes it slower to deliver and hog the recipient’s mailbox.

Some email applications translate the background image into a single image and it looks weird. When this first happened to me, I couldn’t understand why there was an image of a moon attached to the email when it had nothing to do with it. I realized the person used a stationery or signature with the image and it didn’t translate well in Thunderbird.

I’m on some excellent mailing lists and enjoy reading the quality discussions. Other than the usual pet peeves of people not following basic mailing list etiquette, emails with colorful fonts and fonts like Comic Sans (Die! Comic sans, die!) make me clench my hands. They’re hard to read and not professional (some of these lists are professional-related).

Boring as they are, Verdana and Arial work best for emails. If you want to do something different for a special occasion, that’s okay. But to use color and funky fonts for every email message is going to rub folks the wrong way.

It’s bad enough dealing with my daughter’s instant messages that come in bright colors and bad contrasts forcing me to squint or copy them into a plain email for easier reading. But I know kids love to play with fonts and colors. Good. Let them get it out of their systems and maybe by the time they go out in the real world, they’ll resort to normal and boring fonts.

You should see what her and her friends use in their PowerPoint presentations… must… keep… mouth… shut.