Max Glenister

Recently it was pointed out to me that Pizza Express provide a nice fallback for photos on their picture-heavy emails. Take the following example, from a promotional email they sent out earlier this year:

And the same email with images disabled:

And here’s another example:

It looks as if they’ve used this application from Style Campaign to produce the low-fi fallback. It’s a java application that takes a pixel image and outputs either table-based or css-based styled markup, while allowing you to scale up your images. On the Style Campaign blog they’ve got lots more examples of the technique.

It’s an interesting technique, either as a meaningful low-fidelity representation of the missing image, or a subtle easter-egg with a Teletext-esque feel to it. Either way, the low-fidelity version resembles the original image somewhat.

The downside to this though is that there’s a bunch of meaningless table markup behind that simple low-fidelity image, and the original image is then sliced up to fit these constraints, but it’s a HTML email. I’m not surprised to see a couple of tables.