It’s a bit old now, but Hylke Bons posted a great wrap up on elegance in software user interface design, and some big problems that application designers in the Gnome community need to work on fixing. Things like multiple borders when only one is needed, redundant labelling, lack of whitespace and so on. Gnome does look pretty good (especially when you change the fonts) but there are still a lot of things that could be improved.
