The new Ubuntu Resources

Today we’ve launched the alpha version of our latest project: the Ubuntu Resources website.

This is our first responsive project that follows the mobile-first methodology and we’re very excited to share this with everyone!

As you’ll be able to see, we’re not quite done with it yet, but we wanted to share what we’ve created so far, so we can get feedback and keep improving the design and expanding the features.

A little bit of background

This project grew from the need to separate content like case studies, news, press releases and events, from the core of the Canonical and Ubuntu sites — and it will eventually replace much of what currently is at insights.ubuntu.com. As the site is designed for reading and engaging with longer pieces of content, we thought it would be the ideal place to explore mobile-first and responsive approaches. And we plan to use what we’’ve learned from it to make www.ubuntu.com and our Web Style Guide responsive.

Scaling things down

We started the research phase taking a holistic view of the project, trying to understand what types of content and users we wanted to target. We realised that with limited time and resources we would have to divide the project into different releases, so that we could make sure each aspect of the site was given the attention it deserved.

The first and current release of the site — alpha — focuses solely on small screens. The main goal is that all the content is accessible and the visual style and features will be progressing and being added as we go.

Reusing existing styles

One of the challenges in this project was deciding how we were going to integrate the existing Web Style Guide, which we’ve been using internally for a while now and will be made public on design.ubuntu.com soon.

We decided to use a minimal version of the style guide that kept the Ubuntu Resources’ style coherent with www.ubuntu.com and that we could improve on.

You’ll also notice small details that align with our phone design, like the grid, navigation selection and icons, and we’ll be adding even more in the upcoming releases.

What’s coming

Apart from working on the larger screen versions of the site, some of the things we will be looking into for the next iterations are:

• the ability to subscribe to different types of content
• more curated topic landing pages
• content filtering and sorting
• cleaner URLs
• the way we handle PDFs and other file formats
• more content like a press section

Go and have a look at the site and let us know your thoughts. We want to know what you like and what you think can be improved, or any other comments you might have — we’ve included a handy link to the feedback form at the bottom of every page. Enjoy!