The GNOME terminal allows you to have different configuration profiles to suit different uses (different background colours, presence, absence or position of scrollbars, and so on). To set these up, you invoke the preferences dialogue box from the settings menu of gnome-terminal. Select the options you prefer (these changes will be made to your currently-open terminal, so you can see what they look like), and before closing the preferences box, make sure you have put a new name in the space marked "Terminal Class".
To activate a specific class at program startup you can use the --tclass command line option