I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

I have never been a big fan of the default Brown/Orange GNOME themes that ship as standard with each new Ubuntu distribution. It turns out that there is a brilliant project called Gnome-Colours that has set itself the task of dealing with this problem.

One of our key objectives when we started conceptualising the new themes was their ability to be immediately recognisable as Ubuntu, even if represented as a small screenshot. As easily recognised as when it used to be brown – but not that brown… the incarnation that we initially launched was a bold new statement: a little unrefined maybe, but a good starting block on which to build.

I can not believe how many people think Ubuntu’s brown, Ubuntu is not brown! It’s ORANGE! Go ahead, if you’re running Ubuntu right now, open Nautilus and compare the title-bar color to the different shades of orange to the left.

One of the new planned new features of the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, is a fresh new theme. That’s right, no more brown and orange. While for many users just getting some nicer colors in to replace the “ugly” brown and orange is enough (I personally like the brown and orange a lot), I think the Ubuntu team should take this chance to get ahead of other distributions in another way.

François Vogelweith is the author of zgegblog, a site that maintains a collection of great GNOME themes. Balanzan (translated: Balance) is one of its most popular creations, a very comprehensive theme based on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, which contains a wallpaper, logon theme, Emerald theme, controls and icons.

Changing or adding new themes in Ubuntu is surprisingly easy to do. The following article will guide you in adding a new theme from the website www.gnome-look.org.

Changing the loging screen theme in ubuntu is not a difficult matter, what we need is a GDM themes that we can find thousends of them aroud the net...

Anytime the theme or artwork of Ubuntu is discussed, the discussion seems to turn automatically to brown vs. other colors. I don't see brown as being the problem, though, so let me explain what I would like to see in future Ubuntu themes.