« Off to UDS
Made in Ubuntu – May 2010 »

Design in Canonical

Something of an unknown change in the way Canonical does design is the new design.canonical.com site for the Canonical design team to blog about and start the conversation about design decisions that are made and discussed. this goes along with the Ayatana irc room and mailing lists.

I’ve been very pleased with the blog posts on the new design team and I think they’re learning to have a constructive conversation where people can have their say, so long as the conversation is constructive and it doesn’t devolve into flame wars.

There has been mistakes made and I’ve been one people complaining and trying to work out what went wrong with the way the process worked. Button and branding changes just days before the UI freeze with very limited prior involvement from the community certainly is a way to fan the flames of resistance to changes.

What are your thoughts?

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 02:16 and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Design in Canonical”

  1. Jason says:
    2010-05-11 at 03:08

    Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to design.ubuntu.com

  2. Luis Arias says:
    2010-05-11 at 03:29

    I think its http://design.canonical.com. Looks awesome !

  3. Fred says:
    2010-05-11 at 03:29

    I have tried the design URL, but it gives a 404 to me. Apart from that, it does seem Ubuntu shows signs of less openness from time to time. Last minute design, Unity came as a surprise (to me). I haven’t seen anyone blogging about it. H.264 codec support. Mono. All sort of controversial things. As I see it, Canonical is willing to make some sacrifices in order to solve bug no. 1. Understandable, but it could be more (and earlier) open about it.

  4. Azzeddine says:
    2010-05-11 at 03:57

    Interesting post.
    You probably mean : http://design.canonical.com/ :)

  5. Donny says:
    2010-05-11 at 04:56

    Definitely agreed, the changes themselves were not that huge, frankly, but the lack of transparency did leave a really bad taste in the community’s mouth. The blog is a nice step to fixing things.

  6. Jackie says:
    2010-05-12 at 07:37

    I think it would help to look at the history mpt had with the Mozilla community. The way he started to throw all his toys out the pushchair when no one else wanted his One True Vision has a certain resonance with the current situation of top-down “you’ll-like-it-because-we-said-so”.

    Although, in truth, this approach has been building over time.

  7. doctormo says:
    2010-05-12 at 08:15

    Jackie: Citation Needed, can you link to this?

Leave a Reply