Mail App Concept

by Steve Hernandez

This mail client concept is another exercise to improve my design skills. Nothing more. I never intend to actually build the app for Mac OS X. All there is to show are very pretty pictures. With that out of the way, what was the inspiration?

Bohemian Coding released a wonderful app called Fonts. I am really fond of the app and love the design aesthetic. Hence, you can see that I decided to apply the same minimal design philosophy and apply it to an email client. The mock up itself was created using Bohemian’s digital design tool Sketch 3.0. I used streamline icons for the icon treatment and Avenir Next as it’s base typeface.

Mailboxes listed as table list view.

I added a small characteristic of iOS in the overall design. The mailboxes list shown on the left-hand side of the client app is organized similarly to the default table list view. The look is kept clean and minimal. I wanted to emphasize on items that I think are essential for a viable Mail client. The red color used for highlighting mailbox selection and message selection came from Fonts app. The hue may be off a little. As I have done with my past designs, I kept the circular avatar images. It’s a fluffy piece of ornament that I think provides some emotion and personality to your email. Nothing more. There are many email clients that do not provide avatar images with your email. They function perfectly without it.

The messsage composer with preview attachement.

The message composer is very standard. The biggest highlight is how a user may select a typeface. The highlighted font button (located on the top-right corner) will display a ribbon like container of available typefaces. The selected typeface is shown with the red highlight and the actual text in the message is displayed in that font. The area for showcasing attachements are shown at the bottom (footer-like). Upon mouse hover, a preview of the attachment will be shown with a popover dialog.

It took about two days to throw this mock up together. It was more of an itch to see how an email client will look with absolute minimalism. It will be interesting to see how I feel about this piece several years from now and compare it to how interfaces have changed for email.