Personalization is a key thing in our digital lives where it makes the online platform that we use feel more “personal”. In the case of Gmail, the list of available were kind of limited and Google has remedied that. Gmail now has a wider selection of themes (apparently in their hundreds and in high res too) that are of abstract nature, pictures of buildings, creatures, geographical features and among other things.
You can also select background images from featured users in addition to your own photos (a feature announced in 2012). Once you’ve chosen a specific photo as your theme, you can either vignette it (making the corners shade off gradually), blur it or make the emails have a light or dark background.
Also in this Gmail update is emoji support. Emoji have become quite the standard for expressing various emotions in the social media world and now Gmail will support a variety of them for all occasions. If you have used emoji before on other platforms like chat apps, this will be natural to you.
With this update, Google wants to make the traditional email “fun”. The addition of extra wallpapers will make people have a larger selection to choose their wallpaper of choice. Email is usually treated as a serious platform where people send official mail to a particular person(s) and by the addition of emoji, it will bring a discord in this platform. Imagine a case you are applying a job and you add a winky emoji at the end. This sort of incidents will happen and my advice is to use those emoji if the email is purely recreational and not official.
