Blog posts tagged "Design"

Quantal is well on the way to being the great release we’ve come to expect from Ubuntu so it’s time to add to that sheen with a set of quality wallpapers from our fantastic community. This cycle we’re going to try to make the process better than before by setting out a clearer vision for

The release schedule of Ubuntu is tied to a 6 month cycle, also called cadence. Similarly, a lot of our work and planning falls onto our diaries like country festivals on farmer’s calendar. Ubuntu Developer Summits are obviously the main events. However, if you work on Canonical Design Team, there are plenty of other events

We realise that changing Operating System (OS) is a big thing for anyone thinking of testing something out. That becomes a huge barrier for people trying out Ubuntu for the first time and seeing if they like it. As a member of the web team I decided to take on the challenge as a cool

As you might have heard from the blogosphere, we are going to start to ship our take on web apps. Let me take the opportunity to explain to you some of the reasoning behind them and some of their characteristics. Why I would split the why question in more parts. Is the Web relevant? Today,

Every weekly team meeting someone is tasked with baking a cake. Ivanka baked for this week’s cake day – check out her cheesecake! So you know, this is not going to become a culinary blog, but cake day is a good reason to post! Being a designer is not (always) a piece of cake.  

In the past few weeks I’ve been trying to catch up with all the reading that I haven’t been doing in the past few months. One of the books in my to-read pile that I was particularly eager to read was Mike Monteiro’s “Design Is a Job”, published by A Book Apart. I was not

Normally the Ubuntu/Canonical Design Team are busy working on our own projects, but it makes a really good change to work on other Free Software design problems for a change. Starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Monday 7 May 2012, you can join us for the next Ubuntu Design Theatre at the Ubuntu Developer

In the year 2000 IBM showed off the WatchPad, a computer on your wrist, but one perhaps ahead of its time and still needing a little bit of design-love. Of course, we love highlighting beautiful design when it does finally come along, and in the last few days the beautiful Pebble smartwatch has appeared over

Some of original sketches for Ubuntu Arabic are about to go on display in Berlin! We’ve talked before about the work done by Rayan Abdullah on drawing and designing the original calligraphy behind the Ubuntu Arabic for the Ubuntu Font Family and from tomorrow you will be able to see that work for yourself. Until

For Ubuntu 12.04, we’re planning to merge the user and system menus, make major changes to the messaging menu, introduce a new sync menu, and retire the printing status menu. There are plenty of smaller changes you can help out with, too.

It’s only by looking at the whole, that we can design great experiences. And only by building a community of both system and application developers that care about the whole, that we can make those designs real.

For another cycle a selection of images has been put forward for inclusion in Ubuntu. As there have been some questions on other blogs about the process I thought it was worth doing a quick refresher. Each release we ask the community contributors whose images were included in the last release if they’d like to

Introduction to task switching A key part of any operating system user interface is how it enables the user to switch between multiple tasks. In most desktop operating systems tasks are encapsulated into windows, and the most frequently used method of multi-tasking is window switching. Desktop OSs have multiple methods of window switching

All the way back in January we kicked off the submissions process for the next released of Ubuntu. We did this using Flickr and since then the group has been inundated with over 2,700 submissions! This is an incredible achievement in a reasonably short time and many of the entries are looking great. Charline, on

Ubuntu and Canonical had a very strong presence at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The main attraction was our Ubuntu for Android prototype that was published just a week earlier. The beautiful cubic pavilion also housed the Ubuntu TV demo, Ubuntu One, and our established desktop and cloud offerings. The booth attracted a

Every three months, I conduct benchmark usability testing.  I’m calling these tests ‘benchmark testing’ because the aim of these sessions is to measure our progress towards achieving a great user experience with Ubuntu.  Last testing took place in October 2011.  I am now preparing for testing 12.04 to take place a couple of weeks from