A grid redesign & “refactoring” of GMail

One of my favorite recent hobbies has been to look at CSS redesigns of Google’s GMail email system.

In my Apple oriented home office, I’ve used the Better GMail 2 extension for Firefox combined with the Gmail Redesigned 2.0 CSS Skin in order to have a vastly different GMail experience than what comes out of the box. And one that looks much sharper as well.

But without making major changes to G-Mail, Dan Rubin has refactored and relaid the GMail design onto a grid layout, added some spacing, and made a much easier-to-read and use interface for the vaunted enterprise email system.

Dan writes of his spacing changes:

See Also

Rather than adjust the line height of the main message area, I decided to bring as many of the other elements in line with that as I could. Youโ€™ll notice spacing improvements within each line however, reclaiming some poorly used horizontal space. Like Khoi, I felt the message lines were a bit crowded, so to give the impression of more room in those lines, I removed the grey horizontal lines between each item and allowed the background color to bleed through (all they need is some separationโ€”further emphasis on those lines just adds weight). The result is that it feels like thereโ€™s a bit more space, without actually adding any.

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Matt Craven

Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald. Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a consulting practice located in Woodbury, Minnesota. Matt's presently looking for new blogging gigs. Ping him at matt (at) bryghtpath dot com. You can follow him on Twitter.

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