Some very early mockups were produced that entertained the possibility of differing design from the previous incarnation of GNOME.

[8] Cantarell had been designed by Dave Crossland during his studies in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading the previous year.

On January 19, 2011, Carlos Garnacho announced his completion of a tangible GTK theme implementation of Adwaita that could then be utilized by GNOME.

[citation needed] 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 GTK 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.

Adwaita uses 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.

Adwaita defines two separate style classes of icons that are meant to differentiate between concepts used for applications and user interfaces.

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines prescribe that an app's icon should correspond to a simple, recognizable metaphor.