Ink is for email what Bootstrap and other web dev frameworks are for your site. You can take its base code, add in your own branding and design, and in minutes have a full-featured responsive HTML email template that’ll work great in any app your team users. No more need to despair that MailChimp’s email templates are looking tired — you can now code an alternate template that’ll look great everywhere without having to learn the nuances of Outlook’s email rendering.
It’s surprising how backwards HTML and CSS rendering is in most email clients — as is obvious in this detailed chart from Campaign Monitor, Outlook’s standard support is minimal at best and Apple’s email apps are some of the only ones with nearly full CSS support. It’s a mess, enough that most of us just resort to plain-text emails. It’s easier
zurb-ink-code-snippet
Once you’re done, you’ll have a beautifully modern email template that you can use in any service you use, say MailChimp or Sendy for bulk emails, or Mail.app or even Outlook for your direct emails. It should just work — and you can use the email testing service Litmus to make sure it looks great everywhere without having to bug all of your friends to test out your emails.
Email design, freed from the coding conventions of the ’90’s? It’s still a dream, but one the ZURB team has at least helped made a tad closer to reality with the Ink framework. It’s free, open-source, and is the framework you should try out the next time you’re setting up a rich newsletter email for your team.