Apple Emails always seem to go down well – there’s a good balance of inspirational design and email best practice (although there’s a few simple wins that seem to get missed off). This one promotes the educational discount for students (and probably also targets parents/siblings of students too).

In a departure from the usual Apple style, the hero area is a full bleed photo, as opposed to the more regular product shot predominantly on white. This helps differentiate the education campaigns from the Apple store ones, and seems to be a running theme in non-store campaigns.

ps. please can I have a free iPad? (worth a try)

The hot topic at the moment is how the newly released iPad impacts design practices and the user experience for email.

Gmail’s blog has details of the iPad Gmail interface here, and thenextweb promptly explains how you can access the interface from a laptop here. iPad will come with Wifi and 3G options, find out about iPad 3G plans here.

Style Campaign and Campaign Monitor have been jointly testing rendering in the iPad’s mail client, and will release a report in the next few days – an early twitpic can be found here.

We’re itching to get hold of one, and we’ll be posting our thoughts on it as we do. Until then here’s a quick video showing that the overall iPad interface is so intuitive literally a toddler can use it..

Yesterday Apple launched their first batch of iPads (iPad 3G comes later this month) with this jumbo solus email. We’ve looked at Apple emails before, and true to form this looks great but throws some best practice caution to the wind – It weighs in 750px wide, it’s all images and there’s no useful alt-text, but it’s pretty striking nonetheless.

Valentines season is in full swing, with the big day less than two weeks away. Here’s some of the best looking Valentines day emails we’ve seen so far.

Edit – make that 9 – we’ve added the obligatory Tiffany’s email.

Hotel Chocolat Valentine’s Email

Swarovski Valentine’s Email

Net-A-Porter Valentine’s Email

Original Penguin Valentine’s Email

Harrods Valentine’s Newsletter

Daily Candy (London)

Bang & Olufsen February Newsletter

Apple iPod Touch Valentine’s Email

More Apple emails in our Apple email gallery.

Tiffany & Co Valentine’s Email

A quick round up of some email marketing and email design articles from the last week.

Steve Jobs demos the iPad’s email client

All the pointers so far suggest that the iPad’s on board email client will be pretty good, and will even support pre-header text alongside the subject line.

The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

Mostly focused on web as opposed to email, but is there something we can learn from this? Definitely something to test.

42 email design resources

An old but good list of email marketing blogs, reports and resources.

If you’ve got any hot tips for this week, or want a heads up on interesting things as we find them, connect with @iamelliot on Twitter.