Adwaita is the

design language A design language or design vocabulary is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products or architectural settings, creating a coherent design system for styling. Objectives Designers wishing to give their su ...

of the

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

desktop environment. As an implementation, it exists as the default theme and icon set of the GNOME Shell and Phosh, and as widgets for applications targeting usage in

. Adwaita first appeared in 2011 with the release of GNOME 3.0 as a replacement for the design principles used in Clearlooks, and with incremental modernization and refinements, continues with current version releases. Until 2021, Adwaita's theme was included as a part of the

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both Free software, free and ...

widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library (computing), library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of ...

, but in an effort to further increase independence and divergent release schedules of

from that of

, it has since been migrated to libadwaita, which as an overall project, serves to extend

's base widgets with those specifically conforming to the GNOME human interface guidelines.

Development

Prior to version 3.0, the GNOME desktop environment utilized the Clearlooks theme. In October 2008, designers and developers met at the GNOME User Experience Hackfest in Boston. During this event, the concept of a GNOME Shell was conceived. Some very early mockups were produced that entertained the possibility of differing design from the previous incarnation of GNOME.

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

designers Jon McCann and Jeremy Perry authored a document, drawn from a broad consensus of collaborative effort, that aimed to set standards and direction for GNOME's design. In February 2010, GNOME designers met again, and produced several more publicly-available mockups. Also produced from the 2010 meeting was the decision to use Cantarell as the default typeface. Cantarell had been designed by Dave Crossland during his studies in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the

University of Reading The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as the University Extension College, Reading, an extension college of Christchurch College, Oxford, and became University College, ...

the previous year. It was officially added to GNOME Shell in February 2011, and the GNOME Project agreed to maintain and extend the font as needed. On January 19, 2011, Carlos Garnacho announced his completion of a tangible GTK theme implementation of Adwaita that could then be utilized by GNOME. The first major

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

to ship with GNOME 3.0 and Adwaita as a default was Fedora Linux when it released version 15 on May 24, 2011. Due to

's strong ties with

, Adwaita's theme had replaced "Raleigh" as the default GTK theme in 2014; however, in preparation for the release of libadwaita, the theme was removed from GTK in favor of a divergent, simpler one on January 14, 2021. This clear demarcation allowed for both GNOME, with its own design needs, and GTK, with its need for a simple theme that could be extended by downstream projects, to simultaneously prosper. Libadwaita first shipped with the release of GNOME 42. With the release of the GNOME 48 Alpha release in January 24th, 2025, it was announced that Cantarell would be replaced as the default font by the brand new font Adwaita Sans, based on the popular font Inter; as well as the default monospaced font switching from

Source Code Pro Source Code Pro is a monospaced sans serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe Systems. It is the second open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License. Source Code Pro (2012) Source Code Pro is a set ...

to Adwaita Mono, based on Iosevka.

Design language

Adwaita is characterized by its clean, modern aesthetic and focus on usability. Adwaita's design principles are rooted in simplicity, consistency, and accessibility.

Libadwaita

The libadwaita library was created to further develop Adwaita as a more closely-adherent component of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Libadwaita is a library augmenting the

widget toolkit in a manner conformant with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. It lets applications change their layout based on the available screen space, integrates the Adwaita stylesheet, allows runtime recoloring with named colors and adds APIs to support the cross-desktop dark style preference.

Responsive design and Linux smartphones

Libadwaita offers tools for creating applications with responsive

design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

, allowing applications to adapt their layouts based on the available screen space, which aids in the development of

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

-compatible

applications.

Libhandy

Libhandy is a library sponsored by Purism, which was the predecessor of Libadwaita. The libhandy project was used as the basis for libadwaita.

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) serve as a comprehensive guide to

designing A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

applications for the GNOME desktop environment. It helps with creation of

user interfaces In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

that align with

philosophy.

Elements

Color

Adwaita's color palette is used in design of application

icons An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran churches. The most common subjects include Jesus, Mary, saints, and angels. Although especially ...

and in illustrations. It consists of several color shade families that are not named beyond their number designations. Those lacking saturation are known as "light" and "dark". This naming convention extends into the applied concept of user interface styles, where users can choose a base style for on-screen widget components that creates a light or dark overall look and feel.

Typography

Beginning with GNOME 48, Adwaita adopted a new typeface family known as "Adwaita Fonts". The Adwaita Fonts family is a slight modification of the Inter typeface family, however it also includes a

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with Typeface#Proportion, variable-width fonts, where t ...

known as "Adwaita Mono", which is a modified version of Iosevka. With this change, the default typeface for GNOME will be known as "Adwaita Sans". Previously, Adwaita used the contemporary humanist sans-serif Cantarell typeface that was designed by Dave Crossland. Corresponding with the 3.28 version release of GNOME in 2018, Cantarell was expanded to include light and extra bold weights.

Iconography

Adwaita defines two separate style classes of icons that are meant to differentiate between concepts used for

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

and

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

s. Whereas applications use full-color in their primary icons, "symbolic" icons, monochromatic by design, are meant for user interfaces.

App icons

Each app targeted for GNOME should have a primary icon. The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines prescribe that an app's icon should correspond to a simple, recognizable metaphor. They are not meant to be flat, but rather simplistic, and can contain some depth. However, shadows are to be avoided. App developers can request an icon from the GNOME Design Team i
a GitLab repository

Symbolic icons

In user interfaces, even simpler, monochromatic icons that work well when viewed at small sizes are used. If color is needed, it is expected that they should be programmatically re-colored.

Implementations

The GNOME Shell was the primary vehicle for the original development of Adwaita's theme and icons. It remains a major implementation. Similarly, Phosh, Purism's mobile shell, serves in the same role.

References

External links

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

Cantarell typeface official site
{{GNOME Design languages GNOME