Saks Fifth Avenue sent out a postcard-style email on Monday, with the clever “Jeanius Sale” headline. Although the pun may be lost on anyone without 20/20 vision. Slapping stencil font in low-contrast red on this pile of blue jeans would be an awful home page design decision, and it’s no different with email.
It would have been easier to look at with a few adjustments to color and contrast:
Not a huge improvement, but the colors don’t “bounce” as much.
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Maybe the designer was low on sleep.
Yikes.
I’ve worked with a lot of talented graphic designers, but unfortunately usability is not their strong point.
Not only is it hard on the eyes.. The large image format is hard on the inbox too. I would suspect they didn’t get great results from this campaign. Large and/or all image campaigns not only create problems with deliverability (spammers love image-based spam) but also problems for users with image-blocking software.
I agree with Kelly. Big images make me cringe – often resulting in faces like those in the Gmail Grimace Project – http://www.email-standards.org/blog/entry/getting-some-gmail-attention/#When:01:48:01Z
Like I always say, just because you have a multi-billion dollar company doesn’t mean you understand email marketing all the time (ever?).
Just a thought…
dj at bronto
*P.S. A few weeks behind in my Google Reader
I’d love to the see the results of an A/B split test between those two images. It does amaze me how badly some companies get it wrong sometimes.