Blog posts tagged "Design"

Ubuntu is once again sponsoring the excellent dConstruct conference, taking place this Friday, 11th September in Brighton. This year’s theme is “Designing the future” and we can’t wait to hear what the stellar lineup of speakers has to share. As ever, if you’re going to be there, come and say hi, and grab a few

The design team members are constantly sharing interesting, fun, weird, links with each other, so we thought it might be a nice idea to share a selection of those links with everyone. Here are the links that have been passed around during last month: Scaling Agile At Spotify Design Documentaries A Designer’s Guide to Wearables

We’ve got a new CSS framework at Canonical, named Vanilla. My colleague Ant has a great write-up introducing Vanilla. Essentially it’s a CSS microframework powered by Sass. The build process consists of two steps, an open source build, and a private build. Open Source Build While there are inevitably componants that need to be kept privat

I recently tried to setup OpenID for one of our sites to support authentication with login.ubuntu.com, and it took me much longer than I’d anticipated because our site is behind a reverse-proxy. My problem I was trying to setup OpenID with the django-openid-auth plugin. Normally our sites don’t include absolute links (https://example.com/

We recently introduced Vanilla framework, a light-weight styling framework which is intended to replace the old Guidelines framework as the basis for our Ubuntu and Canonical branded sites and others. One of the reasons we created Vanilla was because we ran into significant problems trying to use Guidelines across multiple different sites

How the previous guidelines worked Guidelines essentially is a framework built by the Canonical web design team. The whole framework has an array of tools to make it easy to create a Ubuntu themed sites. The guidelines were a collaboration between developers and designers and followed consistent look which meant in-house teams and communi

We have given our monochromatic icons a small facelift to make them more elegant, lighter and consistent across the platform by incorporating our Suru language and font style. The rationale behind the new designs are similar to that of our old guidelines, where we have kept to our recurring font patterns but made them more

Why we needed a new framework Some time ago the web team at Canonical developed a CSS framework we called ‘Guidelines’. Guidelines helped us to maintain our online visual language across all our sites and comprised of a number of base and component Sass files which were combined and served as a monolithic CSS file

Following the article “To converge onto mobile, tablet, and desktop, think Grid Units”, here is a technical description of the way the Grid System behave. We will go through the following concepts: a Grid Unit, a Layout, a Panel, and a Multi-Column Layout. Grid Unit A Grid Unit (GU) is a virtual subdivision of screen

Last week the SDK team gathered in London for a sprint that focused on convergence, which consisted of pulling apart each component and discussing ways in which each would adapt to different form factors. The SDK provides off-the-shelf UI components that make up our Ubuntu apps; however now we’re entering the world of Unity 8

In the converged world of Unity-8, applications will work on small mobile screens, tablets and desktop monitors (with a mouse and keyboard attached) as

Despite some reservations, it looks like HTTP/2 is very definitely the future of the Internet. Speed improvements HTTP/2 may not be the perfect standard, but it will bring with it many long-awaited speed improvements to internet communication: Sending of many different resources in the first response Multiplexing requests to prevent block

Ubuntu community devs Andrew Hayzen and Victor Thompson chat with lead designer Jouni Helminen. Andrew and Victor have been working in open source projects for a couple of years and have done a great job on the Music application that is now rolling out on phone, tablet and desktop. In this chat they are sharing

In the design team we keep some projects in Launchpad (as canonical-webmonkeys), and some project in Github (as UbuntuDesign), meaning we work in both Bazaar and Git. The need to synchronise Github to Launchpad Some of our Github projects need to be also stored in Launchpad, as some of our systems only have access to

Here in the design team we use both Bazaar and Git to keep track our projects’ hostory. We quite often end up coverting our projects from Bazaar to Git or vice-versa. Here are some tips on how to do that. To convert revision history between Git and Bazaar, we will use their respective fast–import features.

Victor and Andrew are two inspiring Community developers that have devoted their spare time to contribute to the Ubuntu Touch Music App team. I sat down with them during the Washington Device Sprint in October where they told us how they drew inspiration from the Design Team, and what drives them to contribute to Ubuntu.