Hi @SamM540 - I agree that this would lead to much more visually striking emails and would open up design possibilities! This is unfortunately one of those areas where what's possible on a webpage and what's possible (and recommended) for email tend to diverge. Emails tend to allow much more limited coding in order to stay consistent among a variety of email clients, which don't function the same as internet browsers. There are such things as "image maps" where you could have an image and give coordinates (almost like a latitude and longitude) of where links should be on that image. We don't recommend using them for a few reasons:
These would be non-responsive, so they wouldn't work on the wide variety of screen sizes that emails can be viewed on between desktop, tablets, mobile phones.
They aren't accessibility friendly. Screen readers and other tools to help the visually impaired cannot read the text within the image to give context to the reader they are assisting. That is also we why tend to suggest not using a single image "flyer" type of email without some text to go along with your images.
They can cause some deliverability issues. The spam filters that are scanning emails to make sure they are safe can tend to think you're obscuring links when using the image map method, especially with no additional text for it to determine its content.
Consistency between email clients. Gmail doesn't support image maps, and that usually tends to be a deal breaker given it's popularity. It's also possible for email clients to disable images until the end user agree to show/download them for unknown senders, so this could have an adverse effect on the design.
It's still a request we're tracking to just try to keep a pulse on things, and are happy to continue to track it via this post and hear others thoughts. We'll mark this as "Not Currently Planned" for right now just to be transparent, but I think the more use cases we can gather we can try to evolve the email designs as much as we're able to in order to reach that middle ground of making excellent designs and remaining consistent. I think you also brought up a really good point with the designer in Canva allowing so much freedom to make beautiful designs, it's difficult to bring that into an email when you expect it to function the same way.
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