Alex King ponders the complexities of constructing an
Alex’s solution involves creating a “mash-up” signature that embraces all your
But should it be wide or tall? Cryptic or fulsome?
I disagree with his instinct for “going wide”. Do you?
Alex King ponders the complexities of constructing an
Alex’s solution involves creating a “mash-up” signature that embraces all your
But should it be wide or tall? Cryptic or fulsome?
I disagree with his instinct for “going wide”. Do you?
hmmm, I wouldn’t go wide — the spacing would never even out. Kerning and space width vary so much per font, that you’re sure to see some of those lines fudge sending html email. I’d rather stack… and as far as multiple emails, I use thunderbird for one, and mail for the other.
Exactly! That’s my concern too.
Those pipe characters, which look so lovely in a monospaced font, will end up ragged and hard to read in many proportionational fonts.
Go tall!
There’s very little utility to the ‘headings’ describing each URL, since two of the three are simply the domain. Wide looks a lot better than tall, IMO. A simpler version would avoid problems for those people that don’t read email properly in a monospaced font:
“”"
–
Alex King
alexking.org kingdesign.net feedlounge.com
“”"
(There really is little point in the “http:” – what protocol do people really expect?). Even if the font reduces the four spaces to a very small gap, it’ll still be obvious (a semi-colon could be used instead of the spaces, which looks equally good).
Note that a signature should start with two dashes, then a space, then start the actual sig on the next line.
Tony wrote:
But you would need to include the www in order for Mail.app to recognise it as a URL and render it as clickable (which is the point of including it, isn’t it?)
I see the virtue of the minimalist wide version, but is it a good branding tool? People need to know what feedlounge and kingdesign are already.
If it were my signature, then having the reader recognise it as a URL would be sufficient, even if the mail client didn’t (especially since I’m unlikely to know what capabilities the reader’s mail client has). “www” is shorter than “http://”, however (as above).
Don’t people need to know what FeedLounge/KingDesign are with any of the variants? (except for the original non-combined version of FeedLounge). A good branding tool needs to be tailored to the audience, which is completely opposite to the whole combining concept (he’d be better off getting in the habit of inserting the correct sig manually, perhaps using some sort of auto-insert utility).
I would second the branding argument — in theory, I would not want to mesh any number of identities I have, may they be url’s or general tag lines and terms.
However, in your case, your sites seem to be a mesh of personal and business, so you may be looking to do a ‘9rules/whitespace’ interaction. The majority of businesses and professionals would not want that comparison.
The example without graphical dividers is an unattractive example, from a typography point of view. Placing spacer characters in between can also be an annoyance, especially on screen readers who don’t take to sounding them off nicely.
I was hoping you might comment here.
Having whizzed by http://www.dotfive.com/ the other day, I knew that you would know about branding ;-)
I solve this “signature for identity” problem within the one account by manually chosing the right sig for one of three aliases from the drop down box in the Compose window.
It’s not a huge hassle. Not many of my emails require a signature. And, doing this way, the ones that do, get just the sig they need.
I was thinking the other day too — for each company, I would just setup individual imap (or pop if that’s your flavor) account, and then in the signatures area, just create a new one for each, and have it default that signature if you select compose with that email.
But your right, just selecting the one you want in the top right works too!
I like the ‘just select the one you want’ solution. A lot of the time (e.g. corresponding with people you deal with all the time) the sig really just isn’t necessary (unless there’s some stupid corporate policy about it being required) and so it can be left out in that case.
Mulberry has a useful feature called identities for setting various sender-address settings, including signatures. A default identity is usually associated with your primary mail address. Other identities inherit settings from any identity (typically the default) and can override specific ones. Also, incoming accounts (IMAP, POP) are distinct and managed separately from outgoing accounts (SMTP), with each identity setting or inheriting only the latter. It makes sense because IMAP/POP accounts are unnecessary when you’re just sending mail.
Anyway, Mulberry identities provide a more flexible mechanism for processing certain sender-centric mail actions than the all-too-common method of configuring “dummy” accounts.
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