I think you hit the nail on the head here vacri – there is something about ugly colors,

bad = ban… stupid keyboard ;)

Have you seen the bad comic sans site? The design police site might also come in handy ;)

we have a client at our office that sends all emails in Comic Sans and in an almost neon-like blue. Its ghastly. I am a fan of ‘useful’ HTML in emails, like you say bold & italics or tables for sure. It does wind me up though to see a 150Kb email of which there is only a paragraph of text within it.

@Ian – I concur. This could actually be a very good thing for the internet as a whole. Or at least it would improve the quality of myspace pages. :mrgreen:

@Craig – sigh… ASCII art doesn’t work when your users figure out how to change the default font in Outlook and also in notepad to some non-monospace crazy looking thing. :(

@vacri – Thank God my mom haven’t figured out how to change font color’s yet. :mrgreen:

But yes, I think you hit the nail on the head here vacri – there is something about ugly colors, animated gifs and lot’s of flash dodad’s that seems to appeal to the most clueless users. Case in point: Myspace profiles.

My theory is that you can tell a persons level of fluency with technology by how ugly their myspace profile looks. ;)

Once again we get the disconnect between power users/professionals for whom such a thing is a hindrance, and regular users, for whom such a thing is part of the message itself. As an example, my mother likes playing with text colours (not so much fonts) and they mean something to her and her friends. I could care less, but thankfully green text is a lot easier to deal with than stupid fonts…

BIG FAT DITTO!

I also can’t stand people that put their message in a M$ Word document and attach it to the email.

Maybe I am just old school. I still use ASCII art to draw diagrams just because text can be read on any computer.

But without HTML email we would not experience clipart and–even cooler–animated gifs!! How can you be so selfish?!

Just yesterday, I was talking about how the school system should change and I mentioned that perhaps students should have to take a basic design course in high school (to teach things like color choice, proximity, contrast, repetition, how to not use hideous fonts, etc.). Some of that can be taught in art, but art generally isn’t required (and isn’t available in many schools). Plus, design is applicable to nearly everything in the business world in a very concrete way. If people had a concept of when whitespace is good and when it isn’t, half of all resumes would instantly improve (as well as memos, announcements,etc.).