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February 19, 2009 12:36 PM PST

Mix your own Gmail theme

by Seth Rosenblatt
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(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google's thrown in a slight change to Gmail's Themes option. Users can now select their own colors for background, links, tabs, and text.

There's actually a lot of customization available so that the sidebar can be customized separately from the message body, for example. Custom colors are an option, too, which is carried over from Labels. However you decorate your Gmail, you'll be stuck with the multicolored Gmail logo, so theme-obsessed aesthetic ascetics are out of luck.

The feature can be accessed from the lower-right corner of the Themes page, once you've activated Themes in Gmail Labs.

Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter.
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by gerrrg February 19, 2009 1:03 PM PST
Right on...about time!
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by Hunnter2k3 February 19, 2009 2:28 PM PST
Pretty decent, but i don't think there is enough control over some things, compared to what actual styles can do.
Border control would make it perfect. (could probably be under an advanced link on the right side of the customization panels)
Also, i noticed one problem with one section, when you edit the inner Divs of sidebars, you can't change Link colour, and that is a bad thing. (already i had a dark blue background with a slightly lighter blue link)

The Terminal theme is one i liked, but some tiny parts that are off. (specifically checkboxes and labels on the e-mails list and labels sidebar being unaffected by the Terminal theme.)

Shame you couldn't link to a background image from your Picasa Album..
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by cmicaro February 19, 2009 2:43 PM PST
Kind of a good start.

But I would prefer more features included, like the use of gradients or a custom background image or group of images (to show at different hours of the day).
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by majesticrs February 19, 2009 9:25 PM PST
If you are going to waste your time mixing your own Gmail color, you need to get a life!
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by zcollvee February 21, 2009 1:31 AM PST
cool. will not use it though. i prefer the predefined themes
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by stop_filling_whitespace July 6, 2009 6:50 AM PDT
wow thanks for the obviousness!

An article would have included some combinations to feed to the theme-builder. This, however, is whitespace filler. Was your editor asleep?

Where is the content?


In other news stuff happened somewhere about things.
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