Unicorny Gmail

Background

In March 2019, Google decided to kill Inbox, its alternate UI product for browsing email. I'm a huge fan of Inbox, and was devastated to think that I would have to fall back to Gmail. Additionally, I didn't really want the heavy experience of desktop email clients like Mac Mail or Outlook.

So I decided to hack my own browser to improve the UI of Gmail, and wrote about my process in a blog post, which you can read here.

Before and after UI Hacks

The blog post was featured on Medium's front page and received about 1.5k "claps" in March 2019 when it was initially published. Somehow, natural traffic caused a second spike on January 5, 2020, and at the end of January 2020, the post was up to 3.9k total "claps." Additionally, the Design Editor of Medium.com's Design Blog, Modus reached out to me to ask if they could publish the article in their permanent featured collection. To date, it has received over 80k views!

I also took this project a step further, and figured out how to wrap my CSS code to be an actual Chrome Browser extension, which I published here so you can download and install it into Chrome (if you use Gmail).