Web engineering and design team

Discover the latest news and work from the web and design team.

The Web and design team at Canonical pride themselves on building things properly, not quickly. Always looking for creative ways to push the boundaries of the web.

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Canonical
17 August 2011

Quick wallpaper update

Design Ubuntu

Just a quick update for those of you who are interested. As we speak the contributors whose images were selected for the last release of Ubuntu are sifting through the many many images submitted for the Oneiric release in October. You can take a sneaky peek at the shortlist in this Flickr group, there are

Canonical
17 August 2011

Mark Shuttleworth
16 August 2011

Dash takes shape for 11.10 Unity

Design Ubuntu

Feature freeze for 11.10 brings the likely look and feel of Unity for this release into focus. We’ve moved from Dash Places to Scopes and Lenses, introduced more sophisticated filtering and cleaned up some visual elements.

Mark Shuttleworth
16 August 2011

Canonical
15 August 2011

Ubuntu Arabic, in print!

Research Ubuntu

A beta of Ubuntu Font Family Arabic, in print as part of the testing and debugging process for the Arabic coverage.The magazine is an intriguing tri-lingual production published by the Cultural Office of Saudi Arabia in Germany … German and English articles using Latin script at one cover and Arabic from the other.

Canonical
15 August 2011

Canonical
4 August 2011

Thunderbird & Evolution Usability Testing

User Experience Ubuntu

Recently we hired an external consultant to compare the usability of 2 email clients: Thunderbird and Evolution. I have taken some highlights from the report to compose this blog. Setting of the usability session The sessions took place in early June at the Canonical Office in London. Thirty participants were recruited....

Canonical
4 August 2011

Canonical
19 July 2011

Wireless dominoes

Notes Ubuntu

A while back we linked a video which explored organic displays, screens composed by “smart”, independent and moving pixels. The concept of “invisible” computers embedded in tiny units able to coordinate themselves for a bigger result is definitely fascinating. Today I saw this other inspiring project: Esper Domino from...

Canonical
19 July 2011

Canonical
13 July 2011

Ubuntu Orange is #dd4814

Article Ubuntu

Say it loud and say it proud! #dd4814 is the Ubuntu Orange and we want the world to know about it!

Canonical
13 July 2011

Canonical
8 July 2011

Get excited and make things! – Wallpaper edition!

Design Ubuntu

Not that long ago Matt Jones of BERG fame came up with a really lovely idea! In response to the keep calm and carry on posters from the Second World War that had become so popular again he decided that a more positive statement was needed! “It occurred to me that this was exactly the

Canonical
8 July 2011

Canonical
7 July 2011

My stickers have arrived!

Design Ubuntu

The stickers I made in my recent blog post have arrived and they’re lovely!

Canonical
7 July 2011

Canonical
5 July 2011

Overlay Scrollbars – Update

Notes Ubuntu

When we introduced the new overlay scrollbars we knew it was a bold decision and we were expecting some critics because of the use cases we didn’t support. As hoped, we had a lot of very useful feedback. Most of the people very liked this innovation and understood our need to be consistent to our

Canonical
5 July 2011

Canonical
4 July 2011

Most northerly Ubuntu fan?

Notes Ubuntu

This week we got a fun update from our traveling team member Ivanka! While passing through Dawson City in northern Canada Ivanka and Nick met Chalsie Warren and she recognised the Ubuntu stickers on their bike! This got me wondering whether we can track down the most extreme users starting with the most northerly Ubuntu

Canonical
4 July 2011

Canonical
30 June 2011

What’s round and sticky and how you can make some!

Design Ubuntu

Some of you out there may have already seen that funky print shop MOO.com just launched a new product, round stickers. This means that you can now upload round images and make lovely bespoke stickers in a pack of 52. Full disclosure before I start to say that I used to work at MOO.com which

Canonical
30 June 2011

Canonical
28 June 2011

Ubuntu Billboards: Design on a Grand Scale

Design Ubuntu

It’s been five years since people spotted the last Ubuntu billboards in the wild. This time Mauricio Pretto sent a set of photographs of driving between the airport in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (International Free Software Forum) venue where Canonical and Ubuntu have a stand for FISL 2011:

Canonical
28 June 2011

Canonical
23 June 2011

Kashmiri Arabic script – questions, questions…

Design Ubuntu

We are now putting the two complex scripts Hebrew and Arabic together. Although the basic design of the Arabic was finalised some months ago we have been doing a lot of background work investigating language support, and thus defining a glyph set. This work has led us to have aprox. another 1,000 glyphs in the font...

Canonical
23 June 2011

Inayaili de León Persson
17 June 2011

Sharing Ubuntu with the world

Article Ubuntu

We all know Ubuntu is great, but we want even more people to know just how great. With this in mind, we thought we’d give the visitors of ubuntu.com the tools to spread the word about Ubuntu. As of today, you can see Tweet and Like buttons on some of the key pages of the

Inayaili de León Persson
17 June 2011