They included some beautiful new holiday templates, plus some new themes like “Environment” (for all the green and earth-friendly businesses we’re seeing in MailChimp) and “Functional” for use in very specific applications, like, say, Autoresponders.

What’s cool is that since we’re using our new Template Design Language, some of the templates have some unique MailChimp features baked right in. I’ll show you what I mean…

To find them, create a campaign. When it’s time to pick your template, go to the “Gallery” tab:

You’ll notice a pulldown menu where you can sort the template by category:

Under “Holidays” you’ll notice some elegant options, like:

Mmmm, turducken (what the heck is a “turducken?“).

Under the “Functional” category, we have new templates that you can use for very specific cases, like an annual autoresponder when it’s time to come in for a checkup:

Under the “Environment” category, you’ll find this template:

Let’s take a closer look at this one.

In the right column, you’ll notice a series of tips. We’re using MailChimp’s nifty ability to create addable content blocks:

Just keep clicking the little “+” icon, to add more tips.

Yes, Style and Versatility

I know this template is called “Live Green,” but this particular template is actually versatile enough to be used for other applications.

Like, saaaay, a plumber’s newsletter.

Let’s use the iStockphoto integration in our image gallery to search for “plumber” pictures:

and plop it into the left column of our template:

After that, I can tweak the colors, fonts, and other styles to match my brand.

Exportable for Template Hackers

Here’s a power tip from Fabio (yes, that’s his real name). He’s one of the DesignLab scientists who contributed a bunch of these templates, and is working on many more.

“Most of these pre-built templates are kind of rigid, but if you’re handy with HTML/CSS, you can take any one of them and export the code in order to tweak it exactly the way you want:

Tip: You’ll want to brush up on our Email Template Language (here’s a handy video tutorial).

Then, re-import your custom template back into MailChimp by clicking this button:

just copy-paste your code into our template editor and hit save:

We hope you find these useful. Stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot more email template announcements to make!

So we just upgraded our HTML Email template designer to work for Gmail. It uses inline-CSS to add the padding for proper Gmail rendering. In other email programs, where CSS doesn’t work, our templates fail gracefully to use the old-fashioned cellpadding. Here’s a before-and-after screenshot (click to zoom in):

MailChimp users: This only applies to brand new templates, created after February 15th. Normally, we like to make changes like this retroactive, but this was one of those changes to our code base that just wouldn’t allow for that.  So if you want your templates to work perfectly in Gmail, you’ll need to create all new ones in MailChimp. Otherwise, your templates will work fine in all the other major email programs. If you’re looking for an excuse not to go through the work of creating new templates, you can always say, “That’s Gmail’s problem, because they’re still in friggin’ beta.”

For me, this was just a good excuse to sit down and tweak all my old templates, and to go ahead and make a few more (see: 7 basic email templates every business needs).