The creation of gtk and metacity themes and engines is not as trivial as it appears to be. Someone who, in my opinion, has made some great contribution to the look and feel of Gnome is 22 year old, Andreas Cimitan, who’s contribution to creating a unified looking gnome has been outstanding. He is the creator of Murrine GTK+ Engine, The new author of the the Clearlooks GTK+ engine shipped in since Gnome’s 2.20 release and also the maintainer of gnome-theme-extras. His work on Murrine is particularily interesting as it will be the first RGBA GTK+ Engine. What does this mean? In a nutshell the ability to have transparent widgets/alpha capable windows etc.
I had a chat with him yesterday ( on IRC ), asked him if he could identify a font in a screenshot that I had been looking for, for quite some time. Not only was he able to identify the font, he could tell me what style of hinting was in the persons .fonts.conf.
Ubuntu Hardy Heron Ships with the Murrine engine and a Human-Murrine Theme by Default. Andreas has only published Screenhost of these new feautres as the source code has not been released yet. You can read more about his approach here. Keep up the awesome work Andreas.
The Trade 
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