The Source

Some of us in the Design team have been gathering on a monthly basis to have lunch together and share things we find interesting to us. Today, I’d like to share with you the Brown Bag lunch we had this week. Vesa shared with us his interest in photography and showed us some of the

In the previous post, we talked about how to design effective user testing tasks to evaluate the usability of an interface. This post continues with this topic by highlighting a number of key strategies that you may need to use when conducting a formative user testing, whose main aim is to identify usability problems and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHs0bYWcq-E App design Clinic #4 focuses on icons, with questions from Stuart Langridge including: guidance on creating app icons (stylistically and in terms of file format and resolution) tips on how to use action icons The presentation deck link will be shared on the blog once it’s been checked by our icon

Recently some concerns were expressed by fixubuntu.com, a website focusing on Ubuntu privacy, about a routine trademark enforcement email that Canonical sent. We want to provide some context around this issue. In Ubuntu we cherish an open and diverse discourse, and we welcome differing and challenging views and perspectives; it is the cor

The goal of this tutorial series is to demonstrate the power of Juju service orchestration for deploying web applications and infrastructure services. Juju is a service orchestration framework that is designed to make it very easy for application designers to deploy their applications in an easy, repeatable and logical manner without all

I recently attended my first cloud sprint meeting held in San Francisco, and it turned out to be a great experience. It’s been 10 years since I last visited, so as well as working hard, it was nice to have the opportunity to see the city again. Whilst there we worked on the UX and

So I am stretching the metaphor a bit, but I think it accurately explains my experience of the recent cloud sprint in San Francisco. The week starts with some presentations and talks about where we are now and where we want to be from a company, marketplace and product perspective.  This lasts about two hours,

Watch Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, create an entire Ubuntu OpenStack cloud from scratch using building blocks chosen by his live audience at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong.

Today at the OpenStack Design Summit in Hong Kong, we announced the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (Ubuntu OIL). The programme will test and validate the interoperability of hardware and software in a purpose-built lab, giving Ubuntu OpenStack users the reassurance and flexibility of choice. We’re launching the programme with many

Canonical was the first company to commercially distribute and support OpenStack, under the Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure brand. Ubuntu is also the reference operating system for the project. Since 2011, we’ have included the latest version of OpenStack in every Ubuntu release, and made every OpenStack release available for the most recent

I was recently asked to attend a cloud sprint in San Francisco as a front-end developer for the new Juju GUI product. I had the pleasure of finally meeting the guys that I have collaboratively worked with and ultimately been helped by on the project. Here is a collection of things I learnt during my

Big Data comes with big choices, in every way! From the tools you use to the investment you make in people and infrastructure. Although Hadoop is arguably the most popular Big Data platform, there are still many implementation and even more add-ons to choose from. To help you decide which one works best for your

Graham pointed out a recent Wall Street Journal article out to me as I was going on about my recent kitchen renovation (yes, I’ve used IKEA units). It gives a glimpse into IKEA’s ‘painstaking’ and, for me, fascinating design process. Photo by David Even though, being IKEA, they can very much define how people will

Since we released the initial demo of Ubuntu on phones, we’ve been looking at refining the whole Suru theme — the theme on Ubuntu for phones and tablets — and creating visual guidelines for it. Two of the things that we evolved were the treatment of the indented style and the corner size of the

Release month is always a busy one for the web team, and this time was no exception with the Ubuntu 13.10 release last week. In the last few weeks we’ve worked on: Ubuntu 13.10 release: we’ve updated www.ubuntu.com for the latest Ubuntu release Updates to the new Ubuntu OpenStack cloud section: based on some really

Today’s clinic included: A discussion of launcher placement, Brad Well’s Bible app – general design guidance Michael Zanetti’s uAuthenticator app – general design guidance, plus a discussion of naming and how names appear in the dash and in the app header The next clinic is on Wednesday 6th November. We love discussing design, so please