This morning I was browsing when I discovered that Josef Richter introduced a way to recreate the GMail experience with a Helvetica focus: Helvetimail. This is in addition to other developers’ work on recreating popular sites with beautiful, minimalist experiences including Helvetical, Helvetwitter, and Helvetireader.

I immediately got to work. As an avid Mailplane user I wanted to ensure I could see GMail in this new fashion. Fortunately, it worked on the first try by manually downloading Richter’s CSS file, and selecting it Mailplane’s preferences.

I also emailed Ruben Bakker, Mailplane’s developer, to let him know about my discovery. To my surprise he gave me credit for the find in his blog post. What’s even more surprising is Josef Richter has also given me credit for the discovery on the Helvetimail page.

Thoroughly cool. I love this industry.

Below is a screenshot of Helvetimail in action.