I know that I am a very cranky person, but the number of people who fail at the most basic level of internet communication sincerely boggles the mind. I’m not talking about people who can’t write, can’t spell, or try to paste PowerPoint slides into their emails. I’m talking about people who do not have the basic courtesy to include an email signature at the bottom of every email.

Honest to God, I have better things to do than spend my life looking up your contact details on your website every time I need to get in touch with you. And if I have to go back through 162 emails to find the one where you actually gave me your mobile number, I’m going to be swallowing a metric tonne of irritation by the time I manage to get ahold of you.

Everyone communicating from a company, even as a sole trader, needs an email signature, and needs to include it on every email by default. Ideally, the signature should follow an intelligent plain text format: everything I need to get in touch with you should be visible, even to those of us who do not have HTML turned on in emails.

Here’s mine:

Sabrina Dent
Web Design, Marketing & Communications

sabrina@sabrinadent.com
P: 021 234 9938
M: 085 702 8212

Arguably, if you’re getting email from me, you probably don’t need my email address. I include this to make it easy for people to pass on my complete contact details to other folks with a simple cut and paste. It adds one line and I think it’s a good idea.

Obviously, a lot of people include the country code for their numbers in their email footer. This is good practice for international globetrotters, but I am not one. I prefer to work mostly in Ireland with Irish clients, and fucking up the aesthetics of my email signature annoys me at least as much as working with clients in LA.

Here are some things that are not in my email footer and drive me crazy in other people’s:

• The sender’s name rendered as anything other than the plainest possible text. I understand that you’re incredibly creative and that being a corporate drone sucks, but this is not the medium to demonstrate your personal design flair.
• An embedded logo graphic. I’m communicating with a person, not a brand. If I can’t remember what company you’re with, you have bigger issues than the tragedy that is your email signature.
• A great big green P and a note to please consider the environment before printing this email. Do I look like an idiot? I haven’t printed an email that isn’t a plane ticket since 1997, so please piss off and mind your own carbon footprint.

To recap: Email is a communication medium. Your email signature should make it easy for me to communicate with you, first by existing and secondly by containing the stripped down essentials I need in order to, you know, communicate with you.

And if you make me turn on HTML to do that, I will hate you forever.

Most people will be surprised to know that this presentation for VoiceSage CTO Graham Brierton, who presented yesterday at the big nerd fest communications conference Ecomm 09, took three solid days to put together. Five pages of speech, twenty simple slides, three days. But Ecomm is a big deal, and when you’re sharing a stage with Doc Searles, Ribbit, BT, Cisco, Skype and T Mobile, the standard is high and you very much want to not look like an idiot. It’s worth a bit of time.

Whilst working on the speech for this conference and the PowerPoint slides to go with it, Paul Sweeney and I were playing with the concept of “invisible elephants” – the big issues in a business you often don’t see because you don’t have the right data or comparative business intelligence to know they are there.

And at 3:30 one morning, it suddenly seemed like a great idea to order 500 badges emblazoned with Invisible elephant is in your data eatin’ your profits! to go with the presentation. And so we did, right then, thanks to the beauty of the internet and the time difference between Ireland and LA, where the badges were printed and delivered direct to the conference centre.

(I have secretly been chanting the Invisible Elephant mantra in my shower ever since. It completely cracks me up.)

Niall Harbison recently wrote a post on How to Make a Fun Presentation and I am all about that. I think a lot of presenters are afraid of deviating from the PowerPoint norm of click show read click, and sadly that norm is atrocious. Why bother with the speaker at all? Just send in the slide show and be done with it.

At the same time, one thing I increasingly pay attention to these days is the fact that PowerPoint presentations are not one-offs anymore. Because presentations are normally shared after the event, and you don’t have the speaker standing there to narrate them, they do need to make sense when viewed on their own.  You absolutely do not want to click show read click, but at the same time the presentation needs to encapsulate your main points in some kind of narrative style if you want to share them beyond your immediate audience.

Because of the post-event nature of presentations, we also did a special conference page on the VoiceSage site to send people to, with the slideshow and speaking notes.  I think it’s idiotic to send your traffic to SlideShare or wherever when you can capture that interest to bring people to your site (though you obviously don’t want to hit these visitors with any kind of hard sell.)

Also, I love the elephant and it was an excuse to add more elephant. Who doesn’t want more elephant?

Despite the fact that I am very much a web designer with the emphasis on web, I get suckered into doing business cards for existing clients every now and then despite the fact that I hate, hate, hate print. The Proofreading Girl’s card was really awkward to do, simply because the email address and URL are so bloody long; justifying them on either side broke the centre line, and centring the contact details just looked… lazy.

It seemed natural to extend the text somehow, so I came up with this. There are not a huge number of ways to make your cards stand out when you’re doing “€3.99 for 250 cards” printing at VistaPrint, but I think this is pretty damn clever.

Tip: VistaPrint prints reds darker than your colour values; the preview colours after upload are an accurate preview. Which explains why these are hot pink; they will print in a more plummy shade.