Email – To Video OR Not To Video

HAPPY HOLIDAYS Everyone!

In my quest to video my holiday message and send it to all my friends, family and clients, I decided to create an html and embed a video I uploaded to YouTube.  Well, I thought it would be easy and it actually wasn’t that difficult but issues definitely can occur when you’re trying to get your message across.

One of the biggest problems is a lot of email servers block the embedded video. So when I got the email there was no image or playback button that would allow the receiver to stream the video right in the email. The most ideal case would be to just send the video with the email but that is not ideal with large video files so that wasn’t possible.

My final solution was to create two html files and in one I added the embedded YouTube video and the other I placed a screenshot of the video with an active link to the right html file that had the streaming video.  That way I could email the html file from Safari and when the receiver opened the email it looked like a live video ready to be played.

The only weird thing is when the receiver clicks on the link it opens in a web browser and you have to click on the video again to play it back.  Might be too many steps for some that won’t like that or just a little confusing.

Bad Design Ideas

Tags

bad design, business launch, clip art, design tips, graphic design, new business

Starting a business usually begins with the concept and then telling everyone who you are and what you do. It is important to get started right away. However, throwing your business name on a card with some clip art and printing it out on your home computer may reflect badly on what your company is all about. It will show many of your potential clients that you’re cheap and who wants to do business with someone who is cheap. Here are some basic design tips that will help you great right at the launch of your business.

1. Using bad quality clip art. If you are going to use clip art make sure that when you enlarge that graphic it maintains its quality. If it becomes pixellated or just simply shows the lack of detail when enlarged then shrink the graphic to the proper size. Some graphics included in your software are pretty dated and if you just plop a black and white image of a flower on your card think about how the viewer is going to interpret it. Does that flower look reminiscent to a wallpaper pattern in your grandmother’s kitchen from the 70s? If you use clip art as part of a logo element make sure that you can use that graphic in multiple forms for all your future marketing. If it’s not, hire a graphic designer to merge that graphic into a logo and can make different formats of it that are press ready.