Ubuntu - Designing an operating system

Ubuntu is a popular open source OS used by millions of people around the world. I joined the design team in 2012 as a Lead Designer, and it was a dream brief. Brand new UI and visual language, behaviour of the OS, design of key apps, new UI toolkit, motion guidelines - literally everything.

Device convergence

When we started the project, we knew Ubuntu was going to run on mobile, tablet and desktop. The grand vision was to build a converged platform, a UI that scales beautifully across different screen sizes and input methods, using a single code base. I lead the design work of the visual language, apps and strategy for the cross-device platform.

Reception

The project achieved a lot of publicity, and has been covered by the BBC, TechCrunch, Engadget, Ars Tecnica, ZDNet and many more, and won several awards.

The new desktop, Unity 8, is due for full release in Ubuntu 17.04, in April 2017. It has been an exciting journey and a privilege to work on such a large scale open source project used and loved by so many people.