Design and Web team summary – 10 June 2019

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.  Here are some of the highlights of our completed work.

Web

Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical.

Integrating the blog into www.ubuntu.com

We have been working on integrating the blog into www.ubuntu.com, building new templates and an improved blog module that will serve pages more quickly.

Takeovers and engage pages

We built and launched a few new homepage takeovers and landing pages, including:

– Small Robot Company case study

– 451 Research webinar takeover and engage page

– Whitepaper takeover and engage page for Getting started with AI

– Northstar robotics case study engage page  

– Whitepaper about Active directory

Verifying checksum on download thank you pages

We have added the steps to verify your Ubuntu download on the website. To see these steps download Ubuntu and check the thank you page.

Mir Server homepage refresh

A new homepage hero section was designed and built for www.mir-server.io.

The goal was to update that section with an image related to digital signage/kiosk and also to give a more branded look and feel by using our Canonical brand colours and Suru folds.

Brand

Brand squad champion a consistent look and feel across all media from web to social to print and logos.

Usage guide to using the company slide deck

The team have been working on storyboarding a video to guide people to use the new company slide deck correctly and highlight best practices for creating great slides.

Illustration and UI work

We have been working hard on breaking down the illustrations we have into multiple levels. We have identified x3 levels of illustrations we use and are in the process of gathering them across all our websites and reproducing them in a consistent style.

Alongside this we have started to look at the UI icons we use in all our products with the intention of creating a single master set that will be used across all products to create a consistent user experience.

Marketing support

Created multiple documents for the Marketing team, these included x2 whitepapers and x3 case studies for the Small Robot Company, Northstar and Yahoo Japan.

We also created an animated screen for the stand back wall at Kubecon in Barcelona.

MAAS

The MAAS squad develop the UI for the maas project.

Renamed Pod to KVM in the MAAS UI

MAAS has been using the label “pod” for any KVM (libvert) or RSD host – a label that is not industry standard and can be confused with the use of pods in Kubernetes. In order to avoid this, we went through the MAAS app and renamed all instances of pod to KVM and separated the interface for KVM and RSD hosts.

Replaced Karma tests with Jest

The development team working on MAAS have been focusing on modernising areas of the application. This lead to moving from the Karma test framework to Jest.

Absolute import paths to modules

Another area the development team would like to tackle is migrating from AngularJS to React. To decouple us from Angular we moved to loading modules from a relative path.

KVM/RSD: In-table graphs for CPU, RAM and storage

JAAS

The JAAS squad develops the UI for the JAAS store and Juju GUI  projects.

Design update for JAAS.ai

We have worked on a design update for jaas.ai which includes new colours and page backgrounds. The aim is to bring the website in line with recent updates carried out by the brand team.

Design refresh of the top of the store page

We have also updated the design of the top section of the Store page, to make it clearer and more attractive, and again including new brand assets.

UX review of the CLI between snap and juju

Our team has also carried out some research in the first step to more closely aligning the commands used in the CLI for Juju and Snaps. This will help to make the experience of using our products more consistent.

Vanilla

The Vanilla squad design and maintain the design system and Vanilla framework library. They ensure a consistent style throughout web assets.  

Vanilla 2.0.0 release

Since our last major release, v1.8.0 back in July last year, we’ve been working hard to bring you new features, improve the framework and make it the most stable version of Vanilla yet. These changes have been released in v2.0.0.

Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve been running QA tests across our marketing sites and web applications using our pre-release 2.0.0-alpha version. During testing, we’ve been filing and fixings bugs against this version, and have pushed up to a pre-release 2.0.0-beta version.

We plan to launch Vanilla 2.0.0 today once we have finalised our release notes, completed our upgrade document which will help and guide users during upgrades of their sites.

Look out for our press release posts on Vanilla 2.0.0 and our Upgrade document to go along with it.

Snapcraft

The Snapcraft team work closely with the snap store team to develop and maintain the snap store website.

Install any snap on any platform

We’re pleased to announce we’ll be releasing distribution install pages for all Snaps. They’re one-stop-shops for any combination of Snap and supported distro. Simply visit https://snapcraft.io/install/spotify/debian or, say https://snapcraft.io/install/vlc/arch. The combinations are endless and not only do the pages give you that comfy at-home feeling when it comes to branding they’re also pretty useful. If you’ve never installed Snaps before we provide some easy step-by-step instructions to get the snap running and suggest some other Snaps you might like.