Another of my little hobbies is redesigning the theme of my desktop PC, which is running a flavor of Ubuntu. Switching to a GNU/Linux operating system has been a huge eye opener for me on the customization front. While Mac offers a few great tools for tweaking things like icons and the dock, and Windows has a lot of options and plugins, nothing offers the hands-on constructive frustration of Linux. You can change the look and feel of anything, quite literally, and usually without breaking anything too mission-critical in the process. It has its problems and limitations (say "X-server" to any Linux geek, and you'll get a saturnine nod), but on the whole, the fun to be had playing with it far outweighs the bad times.
The theme I'm calling StudioJade (so named because it's based on a few UbuntuStudio theme elements, and of course because it's a jade-ish color) began life as a Winamp skin, was discovered by me as a skin for Audacious, and I've been kicking it around, abandoning and coming back to it, ever since. I've taken pains to try to avoid the pitfalls of dark or inverse-colored themes, like magical disappearing text, or areas with too much or too little contrast. It has been revised within an inch of its little green life, but I have based all of my revisions and improvements on what I have discovered by doing what I do with my machine (web browsing, word processing, web development, graphics, and music editing). Maybe it goes without saying, but your mileage may vary.
Also, different screens will do different fancy and terrible things with color, and laptop screens are notoriously bad with dark colored-themes, in part because of the nature of LCD displays themselves, and in part because of how often people look at their laptop screen from an oblique angle or in bright light. This theme may still work for your laptop, but that's not what I had in mind. Like almost every designer I know, I spend a lot of time up at all hours of the night, sitting in a darkened room, staring intently at a monitor for hours at a time. Too much white is hard on the eyeballs after a while, and too much contrast is almost worse -- you can't look at straight-up white-on-black any longer or more comfortably. So there is a need to mellow things, turn the lights down on everything, and let your retinas know that it's all going to be ok.
First a note: this theme will work fine on any variant of Gnome Ubuntu (the "regular" version, if you will), but if you want your window titlebars to look like the ones you see in the screenshots, you'll need the UbuntuStudio theme, which you can get from the universe repository without the software suite or kernel by typing
The theme also comes with a much more groovy bootsplash screen and a better set of sounds than the default Ubuntu installation. (Take it from one who has learned the hard way, though: don't try to install the whole UbuntuStudio package unless you have a pretty serious machine. A slower PC will choke on it in no small way.) So, without further adieu.
As you can see, the "Jade" package includes the GTK-2.0 basic theme, which is really most of the hoopla, and a set of icons, which are basically the UbuntuStudio icons with different folders. Both of these can be installed through the usual channels: System > Preferences > Appearance > Theme tab. (Remember, install the whole tar.gz archive package. Dont untar it first.) There are some wallpapers, which you can do whatever you feel like with. And the "Complete package" also includes a gdm login screen theme, which can be installed with the Login manager (System > Administration > Login window).
Enjoy, and there's more on the way soon.