Blog posts written by Anthony Dillon

Anthony Dillon
4 June 2018

Design and web team summary – 4 June 2018

Article Cloud and server

Welcome to the latest work and updates from the design and web team. We manage all web projects across Canonical – from www.ubuntu.com to the Juju GUI we help to bring beauty and consistency to all the web projects. Web A/B tests on blog Setup an A/B test on blog.ubuntu.com to test different newsletter sign-up

Anthony Dillon
4 June 2018

Anthony Dillon
10 April 2018

Design and Web team summary – 10 April 2018

Article Cloud and server

MAAS squad Homepage A/B test completes The team ran an A/B test on two homepage designs. Based on Google analytics experiment data and Crazy egg scroll-map data for both A and B versions. The resulting winner was B. Which has now been made the permanent homepage. MAAS Vanilla integration teething fixes The MAAS squad have

Anthony Dillon
10 April 2018

Anthony Dillon
27 March 2018

Design and Web team summary – 27 March 2018

Article Cloud and server

The design and web team work on a wide array of projects throughout Canonical. Therefore, we are split into seven squads to handle different aspects of the company. Here is a rundown of the work we completed this week by squad. Snappy squad New snapcraft.io features We implemented a darker themed header across snapcraft.io and

Anthony Dillon
27 March 2018

Anthony Dillon
6 September 2017

Webteam development summary

Development Ubuntu

Iteration 6 dating between 14th to the 25th of August This iteration saw a lot of work on tutorials.ubuntu.com and on the migration of design.ubuntu.com from WordPress to a fresh new Jekyll site project. Continued research and planning into the new snapcraft.io site, with some beginnings of the development framework....

Anthony Dillon
6 September 2017

Anthony Dillon
22 August 2017

Cookie notification component

Notes Ubuntu

We’ve all seen the annoying cookie notification which website owners are legally obliged to include on their sites. We can’t avoid them, so let’s have some fun with them. Previously, for Canonical’s sites, the cookie notification was a shared CSS file and JavaScript file that we injected into the head of each site. This...

Anthony Dillon
22 August 2017

Anthony Dillon
25 April 2017

Designing in the open

User Experience Ubuntu

Over the past year, a change has emerged in the design team here at Canonical: we’ve started designing our websites and apps in public GitHub repositories, and therefore sharing the entire design process with the world. One of the main things we wanted to improve was the design sign off process whilst increasing visibility for

Anthony Dillon
25 April 2017

Anthony Dillon
3 October 2016

Juju GUI 2.2.0 released

Article Cloud and server

We’re pleased to announce the latest feature release of the Juju GUI. With the GA of Juju 2 release coming very soon we’re ready to unveil the new enhanced model management in the Juju GUI. The new GUI allows you to take advantage of Juju 2’s multi-user multi-model functionality as seamlessly as you worked with

Anthony Dillon
3 October 2016

Anthony Dillon
8 August 2016

Web team hack day

Featured Ubuntu

Last week the developers in the web team swapped the office for the lobby of the hotel across the street. The day was geared up to allow us to leave our daily tasks in the office and think of ideas that we would like to work on. The morning started with coffee and sitting in

Anthony Dillon
8 August 2016

Anthony Dillon
19 November 2015

Using Vanilla with Jekyll

Development Ubuntu

We’re using NPM as Vanilla’s package manager. Which gives us a number of advantages such as, an easy way to install and update the CSS framework. This all worked fine until we hit an issue with Github Pages. They do not supporting install scripts therefore it is not possible in npm install. Highlighted in this

Anthony Dillon
19 November 2015

Anthony Dillon
22 June 2015

Introducing Vanilla

Article Ubuntu

Why we needed a new framework Some time ago the web team at Canonical developed a CSS framework we called ‘Guidelines’. Guidelines helped us to maintain our online visual language across all our sites and comprised of a number of base and component Sass files which were combined and served as a monolithic CSS file

Anthony Dillon
22 June 2015

Anthony Dillon
17 June 2014

Making ubuntu.com responsive: JavaScript considerations (14)

Featured Ubuntu

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. The JavaScript used on ubuntu.com is very light. We limit its use to small functional elements of the web style guide, which act to enhance the user experience but are never required to deliver the content the user is there to consume. At Canonical we

Anthony Dillon
17 June 2014

Anthony Dillon
13 June 2014

Making ubuntu.com responsive: ensuring performance (13)

Featured Ubuntu

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. Performance has always been one of the top priorities when it came to building the responsive ubuntu.com. We started with a list of performance snags and worked to improve each one as much as possible in the time we had. Here is a quick run

Anthony Dillon
13 June 2014

Anthony Dillon
12 June 2014

Making ubuntu.com responsive: our Sass architecture (12)

Featured Ubuntu

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘. When working to make the current web style guide responsive, we made some large updates to the core Sass. We decided to update the file and folder structure of our styles. I love reading about other people or organisations Sass architectures, so I thought it

Anthony Dillon
12 June 2014

Anthony Dillon
30 October 2013

Cloud sprint: what I’ve learned about testing and code reviews

Featured Ubuntu

I was recently asked to attend a cloud sprint in San Francisco as a front-end developer for the new Juju GUI product. I had the pleasure of finally meeting the guys that I have collaboratively worked with and ultimately been helped by on the project. Here is a collection of things I learnt during my

Anthony Dillon
30 October 2013

Anthony Dillon

Lead Web Developer