Iterations of the GNOME Shell Design
Initial Vision
This write-up from the User Experience Hackfest contains initial ideas for the GNOME Shell that were discussed there. It also contains the initial mockups for the GNOME Shell that were drawn by Neil Patel. Vincent Untz's blog post has a summary of the ideas discussed at the hackfest.
Expanded View Mockups
Mockups with ideas about application category browsing and displaying additional information about an application, such as the files that were recently opened with it, are here.
Application Browsing Iterations
Application switcher
Overview Mockups With a Black Theme
Here are the mockups for the overview with a black theme from Jeremy Perry. They also include a mockup that displays the search results in the main dash area on the left.
GNOME Design document
Starting in June 2009 we moved most of the design into a consolidated document. It is continuously revised. However, there are a few important milestone releases:
5 July 2009 (GUADEC)
http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2009/07/05/getting-the-message/
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20090705.pdf