I've been a lurker on this list for at least a year, and will probably continue to lurk--I enjoy design but suck at it myself :). That said, as a bit of an outsider, I think the overwhelming problem with this list is that there's no apparent purpose to it: Canonical has its own design team which has little to no involvement and takes little to no input from the community (namely this list). I don't necessarily mean that in a mean-spirited way--it's simply what I've seen repeatedly. Artists come in, and introduce themselves saying, "I'd love to contribute to Ubuntu!" and they're consistently greeted with the motivation-killing "this list doesn't actually contribute to Ubuntu--we just make art that generally relates to Ubuntu." Doing design in a open source sort of way is really, really difficult (I haven't yet seen a successful model--it may exist, but I haven't seen it), which, I assume, is why it's not happening here. Unfortunately, until this community has a way to meaningful way to actually contribute to Ubuntu, I think it'll continue to languish. I'm not trying to be negative--on the contrary, I think there's a LOT of potential here (I really think Ubuntu has the potential to break through the outlandishly difficult problem of open source design). I'm just not smart enough to solve the problem itself. -- Peaces, Jake