Parallax in email - Say whaaat?!

👋🏾 Hey friends - new and old,

So... Wow, that Parallax experiment turned out to be really popular! I knew it would turn some heads, but I didn't at all expect it to be such a big hit.

My Twitter and Linkedin notifications were blowing up with support and a big group of you lovely people joined this mailing list. Plus, one of my sites analytics tools - Squeaky.ai, warned me I was going to exceed my monthly 500 visitor tracking limit on Friday afternoon and then 1.5 hours later, subsequently stated it was exceeded and they would stop tracking. I'm only on the free plan and never expected to get anywhere close to that limit 😂

I'm not usually that interested in my visits but I added analytics in case one day I ever needed to. It was only these notifications from Squeaky that made me look. Thankfully though, I installed two analytics services because I couldn't decide between them. The second, umami.is is still going strong and I'm at almost 700 unique visits and just over 1400 total 🤯 Thank goodnees for uncapped free beta plans!Friday the 14th had the biggest spike and I think this was all down to my friends at ActionRocket including it in their weekly newsletter 🫶🏾

Anyway... Thank you everyone for the love and to anyone who shared it with others. It was just an experiment and it's unfortunate more email clients don't support this modern CSS. I am by no means the first person to attempt this technique in email. Mark Robbins' initial work which I stumbled upon, was of great help and since then he's sent on another test of his and I'm sure a few others have experimented as well.

Overall it's amazing to see there is this much excitement in the industry for new and crazy things and not just from developers and designers. 

🔮 What's next?

This project took just over 3 months to pull together. A loooong time, but that's reality for me. As I've mentioned many times before (blah blah, here he goes again with his sob story), I'm very hands on with our 18 month old, so extra curricular activities like this or my hobbies, come after baby (or is he a toddler now?), my day job and house duties. I basically utilise any random free time I get, so usually very late nights and weekends. It'll probably be a little while before I'm ready to share anything complete again. 

I also need to find or stumble upon an idea I'm passionate about. Without that, I'm not that motivated. I have a huge list of ideas saved in Notion, Dribbble and in my bookmarks that I now need to sift through to see if they sparks anything.

One of my recent favourite inspiration pieces was this amazing 3D carousel by Michael Zalobny. It's mesmerisingly beautiful. Rebuilding this to work for email could be quite cool, kind of like how I built the Tesla car configurator to work with just HTML & CSS for email, as opposed to the JS frameworks that were used to build the initial rebuilds by front end devs. Michael built the carousel with Three.js, next.js and Greenock. It would require a lot of work, which I'm certainly up for, as you've seen. And it would fit perfectly with the spirit of pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible in email.

Let's see though, I'll keep you posted on what I decide on. I may also share my ideas, as one of you may find something in there that interests you and you can build something to share with everyone. None of this is secretive and I'm making no money off of these experiments, so no problem sharing them with everyone to enjoy.

📰 Other news

I only realised this while thinking of how to wrap up this update, but I've just passed the 12 month mark at Mayoris/Mailix 🥳

They're based in Rotkreuz, Switzerland, I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland. My first remote role but it's gone without a hitch. I even got to travel to Switzerland to meet everyone, last month. Well worth seeing people in person, it just humanises those digital interactions, as easy as they are these days. 

Been an incredible ride so far. Had the opportunity to work on some great projects with great people. The team have easily made the transition to making any meetings I'm attending, run in English so I can participate. No complaints, they've just done it. I've always wanted to learn German and this has pushed that interest into a genuine personal goal and then maybe I could meet them halfway. But... That may have to wait until Finn is in nursery. So... Next year 😮‍💨

I've rambled enough... Stay safe. Hopefully I'll have made my mind up and have an update on my next project soon. 

Niven ✌🏾