This week in design – 23 July 2010

Edition 2: Summer time edition!

Another busy week in the world of the Canonical Design Team and we start with a bit of someone else’s news (although we helped!)

Stoked about The Stack!

Regular blog readers may remember Evan from a week ago. He was asking you to support his stack exchange experiment.

You guys responded magnificently with a drive to lend support and we’re thrilled to say that we’ve got a 100% commitment from community members so the next steps are a beta site which will be built for us. We’ll let Evan update us on when this might happen but thanks to everyone who committed and we’re looking forward to creating something great with you. If you don’t know what on earth we’re talking about then head over to our earlier Stack Exchange post.

Ubuntu development

This week was the distro sprint. A middle-ish milestone in the development process for our 10.10.10 release and an opportunity for the desktop members of the design team to get together with the developers implementing our designs. Canonical’s distributed nature means that we try to get together regularly through the cycle to enjoy some high bandwidth collaboration. This is especially valuable when working on interactions and visual treatments as it allows us to work out the important details while we’re together. It’s been a great week and you should see the fruits in a future Alpha release.

The Ubuntu font

Work continues a pace with the development of the Ubuntu font and as Ivanka was saying in her post earlier this week the next steps are to open this up to wider groups and start testing in other languages. If you’re an Ubuntu member you already have access to the new font so if you’re not using it get switched over and tell us what you think.

More information on the project can be found here and you can get on and submit your feedback and issues at fonttest.design.canonical.com.

Guidelines

We’re releasing another round of updates to the Ubuntu guidelines this week. You can view them by visiting the toolkit section of the site. From here we’re looking to move to a three monthly cycle of updates which we’ll publicise and publish here.

We’re also looking to get your feedback on what’s in these guides. They should help you to create using the new assets and identities. If you have questions or ideas leave us comments or find us on Freenode in #ubuntu-artwork.

And finally, on an insane note …

Could you walk for 24hrs?

We didn’t think it was possible until Ivanka, Design Team Lead, did it last weekend for charity!

Ivanka, pictured here on the right, completed 100km in 24 hours and 39 minutes. An amazing achievement which briefly resulted in her raising £1010.10 – see what they did there? 😉 You can add to this total and help provide Oxfam with some much needed funds by going to her donations page. An enormous round of applause for Ivanka and thank you to all who’ve donated so far!