How to Write a Professional Email #5

A major pet peeve of mine is poor image quality in emails. I'm not just talking about images embedded in the body of an email, attachments and signatures are also quite frequently ugly. The four main faux pas of this topic are: poor resolution, over compression, format, and size.

Unless you work with images on a regular basis, you may not have developed the eye to spot common image problems. Unfortunately, if you're communicating with somebody who does care about appearances, your unintentional "image typo" could stick out like a sore thumb. Even though that simile is woefully out of date, take it from me: sore thumbs stick out a heck of a lot and really annoy people.

Over the next few blog posts, I'll cover the rules to live by regarding proper image inclusion in emails.

Let's start with poor resolution. There are "image grammar Nazis" who would argue with me about what resolution means, but in the common vernacular it generally refers to how detailed the image appears on the screen and in print. To begin thinking about resolution, you need to consider what the maximum resolution is of the media, meaning the screen, ink jet printout, or laser printer. The maximum resolution of the image never needs to exceed the resolution of the media, but it always needs to meet it to not appear "jaggy."

What does this mean in common terms? You can always scale an image down, but you can never scale it up. If you want the image to appear sharp on a printout, you need to start with an image at least 4 times as large as the size it appears in the email, and scale it down in the email program. When somebody prints it out, it will be sharp and clear rather and pixelated and jaggy. Oh and remember to hold shift and drag by the corners when you scale, I hate when images are smushed or stretched more than anything.

More on this later, I'm out of time for today.