This week in design – 1 October 2010

It’s _almost_ there. Happy “so close to release I can almost taste the Ubuntinis” Day everyone! And if you’ve not tried an Ubuntini, well you should. The next release of Ubuntu releases on the 10th October but the release candidate is out there now and as I write this the final release meeting of the cycle is happening on Freenode in #ubuntu-meeting.

It’s been two weeks since your last update from the design team, so what have we been up to?

Well, for one thing the smiley fella above was born and has started appearing on the design blog. More on him and his siblings from Otto in a later post 😉

Probably the biggest news is that the new Ubuntu font family have made their first appearance in our desktop release and those of you running Maverick will now also notice that the Ubuntu and Canonical websites make use of the regular font as well as this very blog.

You can also read some more thoughts on the type face in Mark’s Blog.

It’s very exciting to see this in the wild and it seems like a good time to say thanks to the people who’ve helped us get here. Thanks to Bruno, Lukas, Amelie, Malcolm and Shiraaz at Dalton Maag who’ve designed the font, Paul Sladen for managing the bugs and liaising with the community and also Ken Vandine and Dan Holbach for helping us package the files, Robbie Williamson for approving exceptions that meant we could get it in after deadlines had passed and finally Scott Kitterman for finally hitting the approval button.

We hope you like it, it’s part of your desktop so get involved over on the project launchpad page. More enhancements are coming so stay tuned for more in the coming months.

So now that our Meerkat is grown up our attention turns to a particularly Natty Narwhal that will need our love and attention before they’re released into the wild about 7 months from now. That’s what we’ll be focusing on and we’ll be sharing more of our ideas in the coming weeks as we prepare for UDS.

And finally, a video treat for you to the end the week with. Those lovely people over at OMG! Ubuntu! reminded me that the Blender Foundation have been working on a new short film called Sintel and they’ve released it online for you to enjoy.

The particularly exciting thing about the work they’re doing is that once it’s finished they’ll share their output with the world not only as a video but also all the source files will be released under a creative commons license meaning that they can be used by others to learn from. You can find out more about the project and the Blender Foundation on their website.

Have a fantastic weekend and here’s to our launch parties in the next week or so!