This has been a very interesting year work-wise. The birth of the “product design” team at Novell lead by Anna and sparked by Nat has been one of the eye openers in how I see my work and skills.
Basically what has happened is a transformation from “The guy who draws pretty icons” to a hopefully wider understanding of usability, guidelines and what this is all about. And the realization that we dont actually know that much yet. This stuff seems to take a fair bit of time to really “sink it in”.
Basically the challenge is this: We have the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines which is a good resource. By looking at mailing list discussions, comments and development, it is great that the developer community has understood the importance of guidelines - Robert was even flamed for creating “non-hig” dialogs because he happened to use slightly wrong spacing in his device settings dialog once.. 
This is good — following the HIG results in clean looking, consistent software. But what has struck me is that usability is a lot more than clean looking dialogs. It is not enough to just check that all the widgets use correct spacing, the tables and forms are aligned correctly and that the stuff is consistent looking. The question is: does my program actually make sense? Does it solve a problem in a useful way? The HIG is a good help here, but it is just a reference to use in the design process.
I guess there will be more on this front in the future, so stay tuned
Robert: I really first read “..a year of pain..” here..