This week in design – 20 August 2010

In honour of a comment made about design this week, we are rocking out as the heading to this weeks update on work in the design team.

One area we’re rocking out HARD is the papercuts. Vish now informs me that we’ve fixed over 80 which will hopefully put us on track to get 100 done this cycle. But we’re close to UI and beta freeze which is next Thursday – 26th August. If you’ve been meaning to get involved now’s your time to shine! You can find out more about the project in Launchpad by clicking this link.

While on the subject of collaboration let’s talk type. Our little font is no longer alone and has grown into a small but perfectly formed family. Regular and bold are being tested with their italic versions and the team at Dalton Maag explained to us where that italic variation finds its roots in an earlier post. There will be another update to the files on Monday of next week so keep an eye out for the updated package filtering through to you and check out the release notes. Thanks again to Paul Sladen for helping with the triage and release notes. Much appreciated!

We’ve also been working hard this week on updates to the new theme for Ubuntu 10.10. Otto has had to take a couple of days off but has been working hard with Andrea to continue to work on the theme and we hope to have an update, discussion of some of the user feedback and ultimately new files out to you all to play with next week.

And finally we’re ending the wallpaper contest today. You can still take part by posting your pictures to our flickr group. A few people have asked if there’s a way to get involved in sharing their wallpaper without using Flickr. Sadly there isn’t at the moment. Flickr is home to a lot of great photographers and also a great tool for us managing submissions. It’s also a great place to find wallpapers if you don’t take to the ones we select – although we hope you like them, obviously 🙂

I’ll be contacting previous winners shortly and starting to gather suggested winners to get these into the release next week.

And I think that’ll do for now. Have a splendid weekend!