Month: July 2011

WebSG was great as usual this time round. Sean Thambiah shared on HTML Email Newsletters, while Andy Croll shared on Responsive Web Design.

Web designers and developers have all been moving ahead with cutting edge cool stuff and are constantly being held back by what browsers can and cannot display. Developing work arounds to have that pixel perfect presentation across all devices and browsers is a pain. But emails are even trickier, they are wrapped around yet another layer… the email client and some are within browsers, some are native to devices, some are desktop applications.

Sean brought back the importance of using tables for layouts in emails, strange behaviours across the different email clients and how some of them just want to do what they want to do. Gmail / Hotmail image gap problems, Hotmail changes header colours, Yahoo have its own way of displaying paragraphs. Pretty weird stuff. There was also a few cool examples. Check out his slides on Slideshare.

Andy shared on Responsive Wed Design. We are truly in a “Post PC” era like he mentioned and screen sizes vary from super small mobile devices to large 27″ iMacs. From the few examples he shared, I think winnielim.com was an excellent example. I opened up the site on my iPhone and also on my 27″ iMac and they all look same same but different in a very nice way. You could hardly tell which was the master design and which was the adapted design. Check out his slides on Slideshare.

The best line for the evening had to be:

“Design like it’s 2011, Code like its 1999 “~ Sean Thambiah on HTML Email design

The session ended with discussion on being an entrepreneur vs being an intrapreneur. Lucian who organised WebSG led the discussion and he rightly pointed out that most in the room are passionate in what they do, hence taking out time on a weekday evening to attend this meetup. The entrepreneurs started out on how wonderful it is to have the freedom to do what they want and be able to control their limitless destiny. Of cause there were also talks on the pressure of owning a business.

The employed spoke less, but it was evident in the discussions that being in a larger organisation allowed individuals to be able to work in larger teams, hence take on projects where smaller setups might not be able to.

Being blessed with good bosses, I shared how I’ve benefited from life experiences that my bosses shared with me. Things like taking care of your health, difference between learned skills and sheer acquired experiences which makes you a better manager.

It was overall a good discussion and a good evening which ended at Kopitiam @ Plaza by the Park with cheng teng (local dessert) and industry gossip.

Thanks to Lucian for consistently organising WebSG ever since the first one in 2007. Till the next one.