@Kristin: If you think the “Move to” and “Labels” buttons are redundant, then you haven’t used them. One adds a label; the other adds a label and removes a label, effectively “moving” a message–actually a real time-saver (for me at least).

I also wrote about how I created Gmail-style buttons with no images on my blog, if anyone is interested.

Another way to deal with the annoying extra padding Firefox adds to buttons is:

button::-moz-focus-inner{padding:0;border:none}

I feel silly saying all this, given your status as a godfather of web design and all :). But I think the implications of the markup you’ve shown are worth discussing.

Just as food for thought… we’ve done quite a lot of work with styling button elements and have written of our findings over in our process lab/blog. The end result of our work is built into the new jQuery UI CSS Framework. It does use images (one per state), but only one element (anchor or button), and provides an array of icon choices and textures to to choose from. It might not have fit the parameters Google was shooting for, but I think it’s relevant to the discussion to present an alternate approach. http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/styling_buttons_and_toolbars_with_the_jquery_ui_css_framework/

Did you all work with the elusive file form element (for uploading files) and it’s hard to style button at all?

The production of the buttons is excellent. My only ‘wobble’ is that I think some of the links that preceded them had some colour cues that I found myself using over the text. Now I need to read and it feels _slightly_ ‘lumpy’. But, as a trade off, probably much better now (buttons) than then (links/smaller click area etc). I would be intrigued to know if colour text on certain buttons was tested and rejected (some I _always_ use, other less so, guessing colour cues might even further improve this excellent and improving UI). Cheers!

I found it considerably annoying that they removed the previous ‘color coding’ that helped navigate the inbox bar. I also puzzled as to why they decided to make the buttons two tone, as it made it much harder to read. Maybe the “faked gradient” should be reworked, lightened, or skipped.

while it’s definitely a chore to write up this kind of retrospective (as is documenting any work), i’d love to see more articles like this from every discipline.

great work! =)