The official rationale for the new design is that the current “graphical UI is really starting to show its age, both to the users and to the developers.

This past week at the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, we talked to user experience design expert Alex Faaborg about the Firefox 3 visual refresh. He shared some insights about the interface design process and talked about some of Mozilla's goals for refining the look and feel of the Firefox user experience.

Many designers of the Ubuntu's new logo and theme worked on Mac platform using proprietary software. Are Ubuntu and free software like GIMP and Inkscape not good enough for graphic design?

The goal of the MyHDL project is to empower hardware designers with the elegance and simplicity of the Python language.

Jono Bacon, Alan Pope, and many others have written, yesterday we published a new visual story and style for Ubuntu. The core design work was lead by Marcus Haslam, Otto Greenslade and Dominic Edmunds, who are the three visual artists leading our efforts in the Canonical Design team.

"CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers..."

"...The current design of postgresql.org needs a refresh! We're looking for talented designers interested in re-developing our look [...] To help find a great designer, we've decided to put $2000 on the table..."

If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what's happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.

Celeste Lyn Paul is Senior Interaction Architect for User-Centered Design, Inc., organizes the KDE Usability Project, and works with open source projects such as KDE, Linux Foundation, OpenUsability, and Ubuntu.