Question: Is there a way to turn off the boxes around the icons in Unity?

Clarification: I do **not** mean the backlight color -- there are plenty of questions about turning *that* off. I want the icons, and just the icons, to appear in the Unity bar, without any lights and shadows and borders. Can this be done?

Answer: 
The launcher icon overlays such as borders and highlights can be removed quite easily by changing 4 icon overlays in Unity.

1. Make a backup of the following image files in the folder
`/usr/share/unity/4/`:

```
launcher_icon_back_54.png
launcher_icon_edge_54.png
launcher_icon_glow_62.png
launcher_icon_shine_54.png

```
2. Either make your own transparent images of the same size or download the files at

```
wget -O transparent54.png "https://i.stack.imgur.com/MiFpK.png"
wget -O transparent62.png "https://i.stack.imgur.com/0NvP0.png"

```
3. Replace those 4 files with the same 4 files downloaded from the above link.
4. Restart unity by pressing `Alt`+`F2` and typing `setsid unity` (or logging out and in again).
5. If you don't like it then just replace the icons with the backed up icons and restart unity.

Example:

![Launcher with no borders around icons](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/495352/unity_launcher_no_borders.png)
To do this locally, we don't have to modify the files in the folder /usr/share/unity/. Instead we can just copy these files in the gtk theme folder under a folder "unity" that you create. This will override the files in /usr/share/unity/ and also, this way, a system update will not remove the change.
But I have a different question. After removing the border, it looks like there is too much space between the icons and also between the icons and the border of the launcher. Is there a way to reduce the spacing inbetween?