Helen Johnson

I use Gmail for my personal email, and I have it open every day. I’ve found it to be the best web based email around, the spam filtering is great and it has a nice, easy to use interface and functionality.

A few days ago when I logged into my Gmail like I do every morning I saw a little notice at the top announcing that there are now Gmail themes that I can use. Cool! So of course I tried them all, there are a number that are just different colour combinations of the standard Gmail layout. There are also a few more fun and funky ones.

Of the more standard ones I like “Shiny”. It’s a bit more… well, shiny… then the standard colour combo themes. It has more gloss and shadows and uses a bluey silver colour scheme.

There are a number of themes based on picture backgrounds, these look quite cool when the Gmail interface has sections that are transparent.

One thing that was interesting when I first chose a theme was that it prompted me to fill in my location (country and city). Interesting I thought. I didn’t notice anything different when using most of the themes. It wasn’t until I tried “Tea House” that I found the reason for setting my location. The Tea House theme features a little fox who lives in a little Japanese tea house and garden, it’s a really cute illustrated design. But what makes it even cuter is that every 2 hours (at least during the day) the scene changes, as does the time of day. So for example at lunch time the little fox will be sweeping out the little tea house with the sun shining, then at 8pm he will be eating his dinner and night will be falling.

At 2pm Brisbane time, the little fox is pruning his bonsai.

At 10pm Brisbane time, it is night time and the little fox is lighting the lanterns.

Some of the other themes also use the changing time/day to alter the background, but so far I have only really been using “Tea House”.

If you are looking for Gmail themes you can find them under Settings > Themes, though apparently Gmail have not released this new feature to all users yet. So keep a look out, it’s a great and fun way to brighten up your Gmail.