After discovering some  quite frankly shocking HTML email examples out there, I’ve put together a very basic but robust template.

I’ve made it available to download here, so please download and butcher as you please.

And remember – ALWAYS test your emails properly using a proper cross-client testing platform!

For some good pointers and best practices for creating HTML emails check out this link from net.tutsplus.com.

I’m going to let the video do the talking for this one. Click here to view the tutorial at www.gotoandlearn.com, or click here to download the Quicktime.

Appy Christmas :)

It’s becoming fairly clear that augmented reality applications are very soon going to be everywhere both on the web and mobile devices.

Something I saw today on a colleague’s machine was (apart from an obvious marketing point of view) totally useless and completely brilliant to watch.

Check out the photo below (a video would have been more effective but I only have a standard iPhone) of N-DUBZ’ new gimmick for selling more of their latest single. Just go to their site, show their CD cover to a webcam and watch them dance around all over it.

I’ve also seen some very useful ways of implementing augmented reality but they didn’t involve people dancing around in the palm of my hand sorry.

Something I find annoying about Twitter is the fact that it doesn’t give you the option to centre your background image, it will only let you tile it or position it at the top left of the screen. This, combined with the fact that people will be viewing your Twitter page with varying screen resolutions, poses a challenge to the design aspect of it.

There are however a few handy tips that you can use when creating an effective Twitter background and few people have written some best practices like these to help you out.

I’ve gone for the background graphic fading to colour technique to keep it inline with the look of this site.

Also, if you can’t be ars*d designing your own you can download them from places like twitterbackgrounds.com.

The next release of the Adobe Creative Suite (CS5) will be capable of creating iPhone apps.

This doesn’t mean that there will be a Flash Player on the iPhone, but it does mean that many Flash designers/developers will be able to create their own apps within Flash and let it do the hard part for them. And you thought there were a lot of iPhone apps already?!

I downloaded my first app created using CS5 (South Park Avatar Creator) and it’s got me extremely excited about the opportunities the new suite will give me.

There’s plenty more info on the flashmagazine.com site, or check out the video on the Adobe Labs site.