If you’ve ever had to create Ubuntu or Canonical related design materials, chances are you had a look at the Brand Guidelines, which, until now, have only existed in the form of bulky PDFs. Those days are over, as we happily introduce the brand new Ubuntu Brand Guidelines site, where you can read the guidelines and download the assets necessary to create your projects.
Ubuntu Brand Guidelines homepage
You can learn more about the Ubuntu brand values and the brand assets, such as our logos, colour palette and pictograms, and how to use them. You can also consult some of our Web-specific guidelines, look at examples of design work that has been done, and download assets like the logos and pictograms.
Brand assets section on the Brand Guidelines site
This is the first iteration of the site: lots of content is being prepared and will be added later on, and we will also work on some refinements to the asset download process, as well as adding many more useful downloads, such as templates and photography.
Among the more frequently requested assets are HTML and CSS snippets and templates that can simply be copied and pasted on internal and external projects, so the designer or developer can be certain everything looks as it should. This is in the works, but it’s something that takes a little bit more time to get just right, so please bear with us.
For now, we’d be delighted to get your feedback on this first version: have you found anything particularly useful on the site? What would you like to see there that you think it’s missing? How do you think it can be improved?
We hope we enjoy the online Ubuntu Brand Guidelines!
Woop woop! Well done guys, looks great & I’m sure will be useful. Already a huge improvement on the PDFs.
Thanks, Jonathan! :)
Very cool.
Typo in “Our Audiences”!
Consumer
An individual or small business group making a decision about an OS or computer.
They **cares** about cost and function, and want the product to be easy to use and maintain.
The user interface and user experience are key to their choice.
Another typo in “Photography”! It seems that there’s no action in this sentence!
We’re more likely to ‘product’ photography in relation to Ubuntu and ‘people’ photography in relation to Canonical.
Wow, thanks for spotting these, hopefully fixed now! :)
Gah, it seems that the blog doesn’t allow double quotations.
Anyway, I find it interesting that the ‘dots’ article in the ‘brand assets’ section has some inconsistencies.
Regarding the enterprise dots:
‘Dots are evenly spaced 1mm apart. This pattern should never be scaled up or down.’
If you look at the png to the left of this statement, though, one can clearly see that this ‘preview’ is much more compact than the css in the page itself. Perhaps the picture should be replaced for consistency.
I’m just trying to help. It’s really a great site :).
(My girlfriend is sad that community doesn’t get the aubergine or dots, though – she doesn’t like orange too much)
;)
That is true. We appreciate this feedback, don’t worry ;)
Re: your girlfriend’s predicament, maybe she’ll feel better by knowing that a community website for example doesn’t necessarily have to follow all guidelines: http://design.ubuntu.com/web/ubuntu-and-canonical-web-universe (see for example, OMGUbuntu’s site…). I’d steer clear from the dots though, they’re tricky!
One small critique: the “four values” of Ubuntu sound awkward. “Freedom” is a noun, while “Reliable”, “Precise”, and “Collaborative” are all adjectives(although Collaborative can also function as an adjective, I doubt that it’s the intended meaning).
It seems to me that it should either be “Free, Reliable, Precise, Collaborative” or “Freedom, Reliability, Precision, Collaboration”.
Hi Ian,
That’s a comment that comes up quite often and will probably have to be readdressed at some point. An organisation’s values are not something that should change often or easily, but we should be willing to discuss it.
Thanks.
I browsed through the guidelines website, great work. But also I discovered, that web forms screenshots (http://design.ubuntu.com/web/forms) were taken using Mac OS. While actually this makes no difference, probably lots of people from Ubuntu design team use Mac, but for Ubuntu design guidelines page, this seems somewhat ironic and even, I might say, inappropriate.
Very true, although I hope the people in charge will be open to considering such a small change.
Where would one find derivative assets, especially my favorite distribution’s; Ubuntu Studio?