This week in design – 27 August 2010

This week we caught a chill in the form of our UI Freeze. That meant that from here on we should only be fixing bugs in the next release of Ubuntu.

A highlight of the design contributions this week was the wonderful user contributed wallpapers!

17 images were added as the new user contributed wallpapers for this release. This isn’t all the images that were shortlisted but the ones we had larger sizes of and felt would make your desktop really shine! We hope you like them. You can review all shortlisted entries in the Flickr group and if none are to your taste then why not take a look in the Ubuntu artwork pool for even more possibilities and share your favorites in the comments.

We have also landed our updates to Ambiance and Radiance in the dailies and those brave enough to be running Maverick will already be enjoying the benefits of Andrea and Otto’s hard work. You can read more in Andrea’s guest post on the matter.

In other team news we received an update to the Ubuntu fonts this week which are unfortunately not quite ready to be given out on general release. However, we’re close and in the meantime if you are interested or need access to the Ubuntu font family then you can make your case over in this Launchpad group.

If successful in your application you’ll get access to the PPA and all the goodies therein for capturing screenshots or making sure your launch materials are all decked out.

And finally this week in research we also prepared to send Charline on a bit of a tour of Asia as she prepares to user test in China and then head to the Epic conference in Japan to discuss the work we’ve been doing in research. We used the work of UX advocate Jan-Christoph Borchardt and his clever Python application called Pongo to make a mobile user testing rig. Pongo uses Istanbul (see the ubuntu software centre) to record the desktop but also overlays input from a webcam so we can see what people are doing on screen as well as in front of the computer. It also records audio for review later. We’ll report back with how we got on and our findings when she’s back in late September.

And that’s it for this week! Have a great weekend. The design team in London get an extra day of weekend this week thanks to Monday’s bank holiday so we’ll all be back bright eyed and bushy tailed on Tuesday 31st.

Toodleoo!