If you have a Gmail account you probably need to pinch and zoom all over your emails. No friendly mobile version for you unfortunately.
However, Google have announced some great news for email marketers; “Gmail and Inbox by Gmail will support emails created with responsive design, meaning their content adapts to fit screens of all sizes. Text, links, and even buttons will enlarge to make reading and tapping easier on a smaller screen. If you’re on desktop, you’ll also see improvements, since emails designed for mobile can also adapt to fit larger screens.”
So that basically means that Gmail will now support CSS media queries and responsive design will finally render for Gmail accounts and that now means approximately two-thirds of all email clients now support responsive design yay!
Google’s Pierce Vollucci (Associate Product Manager at Gmail) and Steve Bazyl (Developer Programs Engineer at Google Apps) said that based on email designer’s feedback, Gmail will first support media queries based on width, orientation and resolution, but added “this is just one part of an overall effort to expand CSS support in Gmail and to give email designers more control over how their messages are rendered”. So fingers crossed we have more design and code treats heading our way!
Email developers will know that coding for Gmail is really hard. For example, display:none is a CSS property that hides certain elements within your email. If you want to display a specific image on a desktop view but hide it on a mobile view, this would have involved styling multiple attributes inline such as:
style=”width: 0px; max-height: 0px; overflow: hidden; float: left; display: none; height: 0px;”
This extra coding would require more testing and taking up more of your precious time in designing and developing your emails for Gmail. But not anymore!
Google is also adding support for a number of CSS font and background properties, so email designers will have more typography options and be able to take advantage of scalable and responsive background images.
Email marketers and designers will also be very pleased to hear that Google is also now supporting <style> blocks. Until now, you would be forced to use inline CSS.
The change was rolled out to the entire family of clients, including Gmail, Google Apps, and Inbox by Gmail.
