Design and Web team summary – 10 May 2019

Peter Mahnke

on 19 May 2019

Tags: brand , Design , JAAS , snapcraft , web apps

This article was last updated 3 years ago.

It was another busy iteration for the web and design team, trying to get a lot of work wrapped up before we head off to Lyon, France for our 19.10 Roadmap cycle kick-off.

JAAS

The team rolled out a new version of the website with a new url, too: https://jujucharms.com now redirects to https://jaas.ai/ as part of a bigger renovation planned for JAAS and Juju. This move also updates the technology used for the site and we’ve migrated the Juju GUI as a Flaskapp that allows us to update and deploy both the website and GUI within minutes. With faster rollout we are now able to iterate and respond to your feedback and bug reports much more efficiently, inline with the infrastructure we use in our other Web Team sites.

JAAS.ai comes with some new and better UI, with more patterns and elements from our open source Vanilla framework . We can’t wait to show you the great things this move will let us do going forward.

Snapcraft

Snap categories

This time category pages received the same treatment as the store page, with fancy banners and more prominent featured snaps.

Publishing your first snap

Following on from last week, the package step of your first snap has had its 3rd section updated. “Update your snapcraft.yaml” has become “Download your snapcraft.yaml”. We now auto-generate a snapcraft.yaml based on the demo project and the name you picked – all you have to do is replace the snapcraft.yaml in the demo project and away you go.

We’ve also created an interactive YAML viewer to explain the different parts of the file giving new users a tl;dr; version of the full explanation available in the docs.

Vanilla

Replace floats based grid with the css grid layout

The 2.0-alpha-1 release removes the floats-based shelves grid (http://shelvesgrid.org/) and replaces its functionality (responsive grid, nesting, prefixing / suffixing) using the native css grid layout.

Secondary navigation

We have an updated primary navigation coming in Vanilla 2.0.0 but unfortunately, we don’t have a secondary or tertiary (if needed) design solution. Looking at our suite of brochure sites and applications, we only use a secondary navigation on Ubuntu, LXD, Ubuntu Blog and the newly revamped canonical.com (coming soon).

Taking initial concepts for canonical.com and applying to recently updated Vanilla navigation, we were able to explore different styles and find a consistent design.

Our latest solution below will be prototyped and tested before proposing up to Vanilla as a new component.

2.0.0-alpha release

We have now made all of the changes that we wish to include in Vanilla Framework 2.0.0 (including the CSS grid changes above). Before we officially release this version of the framework we are testing a selection of our sites using the 2.0.0-alpha pre-release. This release includes all proposed v2.0.0 features but is not recommended for use on production sites – for full details read the release notes.

Brand

Marketing documents

Supported Marketing with the creation of a number of whitepapers, a datasheet and branding for the upcoming Kubecon event in China.

Planning

A large portion of the iteration was spent planning for the upcoming Design Sprint, where we are going to look at all areas of branding across the company, plan guideline updates, expanding the illustration style, look at the Suru language across all touchpoints from web to exhibitions and work out a brand strategy to move forward with.

Icons

We created an icon for the security podcast team, they had made a pretty good stab at it, so we just helped it along, simplified it and brought it inline with brand.