14 DAY TRIAL // One of the designers working on elementary forked the elementary icon and GTK themes to create an old-school version that resembles the orange artwork used in previous Ubuntu OSes.
The Ubuntu designers are changing the current orange color used in their distro to another kind of orange. It's not a big modification, but it prompted one of the elementary designers to make a special theme for elementary OS that gives the feeling of running an old Ubuntu 8.04.
Ubuntu used to run the GNOME 2.x stack, with some changes, and the switch to Unity was a brutal one. For a few years, the Ubuntu look and feel were set in stone and this was the time when the Ubuntu orange got into the collective mind of the community. Now, it's available for elementary OS users as well.
Ubuntu orange lives on its own
Since elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, it seems only fitting that someone finally made sure that OS can properly use that Humanity theme although it's now called "Humanitary."
"Spurred on by a bout of nostalgic discussion in the elementary Slack, about the old school brown-y orange-y themes of the Ubuntu releases in the last decade, I forked both the elementary icon theme and GTK theme to create a theme in their honour: I give you the 'Humanitary' theme & icons," designer Sam Hewitt said on Google+.
This is a complete experience, which means that both the icons and the themes are provided, on GitHub of course. There is no kind of packaging available, but that shouldn't be an obstacle.
Sam also said that the theme and the icons are made for elementary OS, and that means that they might look differently if you try to use them on another distro, like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.