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Blog posts tagged "Design"

Free Culture Showcase

Get creative and submit your artwork to this year’s Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. The theme is Freedom.

Can We Appropriate Design?

’Appropriation’ – the taking of a product and using it for one’s own purposes, in ways unintended by the product creators – is implicitly at the core of the philosophy of opensource, because openness provides for change, adaptation and innovation. Design specifications Last year, I conducted several research projects to understand how d

Bright, light and beautiful!

That’s what we want the Ubuntu desktops in Natty to feel like. We’re changing things a little bit for the coming release too. We’ll still feature some fantastic photography sourced from our Flickr group but this time we’re reserving at least 3 places for non photographic wallpapers, so things that are rendered or drawn. The

Hebrew and Arabic on track

Although I haven’t posted much recently we have still been working away. Besides the latest update to Version 0.7 of the core fonts, which posed some technical challenges, we have now finalised the Hebrew Regular and are making good tracks with the Arabic. You may remember the earlier post on the subject of the Hebrew

Canonical and the Ubuntu project say Happy Holidays with the Ubuntu Font Family released for the web

Google and the Ubuntu project have today released the Ubuntu Font Family to the world through the Google Font Directory.Through the magic of the Google Font API any web designer can now pick Ubuntu from the Google Font Directory and bring the beauty and legibility of the Ubuntu fonts to their web properties. Using Ubuntu

Design Museum exhibition London

Something exciting next year Bruno Maag from Dalton Maag has been asked by the Design Museum London to put on an exhibition of his work. This is a collaboration between ourselves and DM, the exhibition will be in two parts a substantial part of which will be featuring the Ubuntu font. Exhibition from 28th January

Surveying contributions

If you have ever contributed to an open source project or wish you had got round to it then please can you fill in this survey? http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/36WWXCF It isn’t a quick one, but if you have about 20 minutes to spare then your response would be very much appreciated. I will publish the results on

Looking at Ubuntu Brainstorm: Idea #25801

The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will

So, you want to provide an API for the world to use?

I conducted 5 qualitative interviews with developers and here are some findings. You have two problems. The first problem is to design the API. The second is to help people learn to use it. Great API design Is consistent, predictable, learnable. You are creating an API that developers will interact with. In the same way

Participate in research

Are you a developer or systems administrator that uses Ubuntu at work and/or at home?We’re looking for people who might be available to help us on a current research project in London on the 3rd and 10th December. If this sounds like you please get in touch.

Papercuts: Litmus test

Papercuts Natty cycle depends on you!What’s new this cycle and How you can get involved.

Here come the Ninjas

Announcing an all new team focused on fixing bugs, Papercuts Ninja team, and why you should be excited!

Paper cuts need you!

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am on the Papercutters team and, in that capacity, was on the receiving end of an email from Vish who points out a couple of things: 1) Only a handful of members in the Papercutters team are active on the project. 2) For a project to live

The monospace is coming

In contrast to a proportionally spaced font a the characters in a monospace occupy all exactly the same width. In the past monospace type was used on typewriters, and more recently in some specialised printing environments such as Credit Card embossing, or ticketing. Today, monospace fonts are primarily used within a programming environme

Usability Testing of Unity

In preparation for UDS, we conducted usability testing of Unity with general public users.  We are now better informed as to where we should expend further efforts to enhance the experience for users working with Unity. I summarize my findings below. Participants Selection We asked an external recruiting firm to find 15 participants who a

This week in design – 12 November 2010

The theme of this week’s update is one of cool stuff that we came across this week in the world of open source. You’ll know from Christian’s blog post a while ago that we’re really interested in the idea of interacting with your computer physically. Christian experimented with the webcam in a laptop but imagine