Vanilla | Ubuntu

Lyubomir Popov
23 June 2025

Revolutionizing Web Page Creation: How Structured Content is Slashing Design and Development Time

Article Ubuntu

Co-authored with Julie Muzina A year ago, during our Madrid Engineering Sprint, we challenged ourselves to dramatically reduce, or even eliminate, the need for constant design involvement in the day-to-day creation of web pages. Our strategy for achieving this is based on a smarter, more structured approach to content....

Lyubomir Popov
23 June 2025

Maximilian Blazek
6 November 2024

Designing Canonical’s Figma libraries for performance and structure

Article Design

How Canonical’s Design team rebuilt their Figma libraries, with practical guidelines on structure, performance, and maintenance processes.

Maximilian Blazek
6 November 2024

Bartek Szopka
18 July 2023

Vanilla 4.0 release

Article Design

Last week we released a new major version of the Vanilla framework. Vanilla 4.0 introduces the elements of the new style used for a current rebranding of Canonical’s brochure websites, including typography changes of headings utilising new variable Ubuntu font, wider grid width, removed rounded corners, some updated...

Bartek Szopka
18 July 2023

bethcollins
17 March 2022

How we implemented an interactive Live Demo Box

Article Design

The Vanilla squad recently spent a two week sprint prototyping an interactive live demo box. We were tasked with coming up with a proof of concept, to enable demoing of each variant of our examples dynamically. A few guest developers were able to joined us, which meant four of us were able to dedicate a

bethcollins
17 March 2022

Bartek Szopka
10 January 2022

Release of Vanilla framework v3.0

Article Ubuntu

We’ve just released Vanilla v3.0 – a new major update to our CSS framework. It includes a few significant updates and improvements around spacing variables, responsive breakpoints, a new expanding search box and various updates to existing components. Important aspects of the release include dropping a noticeable chunk...

Bartek Szopka
10 January 2022

Lyubomir Popov
30 April 2021

Taming unruly logo sections

Article Ubuntu

Making logo sections can be tricky. Logos come in all shapes and sizes, and without proper care, it is easy to end up with a poorly balanced layout. The problem has two aspects: Creating a responsive section that respects the layout structure of the page it is part of, which in most cases means being

Lyubomir Popov
30 April 2021

Scott Mason Nash
16 February 2021

Improving the code experience in Vanilla

Article Design

For a long time, code in Vanilla was simply set in a monospace font, and we saw an opportunity to improve the way we deliver code examples to users. A key goal is code clarity – code is not particularly resistant to errors: a missing character (or in some languages, a space or tab) can

Scott Mason Nash
16 February 2021

Lyubomir Popov
3 November 2020

Accessibility audit of Vanilla framework

Article Design

The team behind the Vanilla Framework has a background in development, UX and Visual Design. We all care about accessibility, but none of us is an accessibility expert. We were interested in evaluating how well the framework complies with accessibility standards. We decided to start with an internal audit, fix any...

Lyubomir Popov
3 November 2020

Bartek Szopka
31 March 2020

Automating our Vanilla releases with GitHub actions

Article Design

The Vanilla framework has a history of being released very infrequently. Sometimes it has been months between releases, which made the upgrade process often hard and time-consuming. One of the reasons for that was a manual and a quite time-consuming release process. Over several weeks earlier this year, we’ve been...

Bartek Szopka
31 March 2020

Karl Waghorn-Moyce
21 November 2019

The lifecycle of a component

Design Design

Vanilla Framework is a living design system for our products that will grow along with our organisation. Vanilla’s component library is used by many internal and external websites along with the cloud applications JAAS dashboard and MAAS UI. We release updates approximately every 2 weeks, either for bug fixes,...

Karl Waghorn-Moyce
21 November 2019

Anthony Dillon
3 September 2019

Design and Web team summary – 03 September 2019

Article Design

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work. Web squad Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical. Build and release dqlite.io The dqlite.io site has been built and deployed.

Anthony Dillon
3 September 2019

Anthony Dillon
25 June 2019

Design and Web team summary – 25 June 2019

Article Design

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work. Web squad Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical. Getting started with AI webinar We build a page to promote the

Anthony Dillon
25 June 2019

Karl Williams
20 June 2019

Vanilla Framework 2.0 upgrade guide

Article Cloud and server

We have just released Vanilla Framework 2.0, Canonical’s SCSS styling framework, and – despite our best efforts to minimise the impact – the new features come with changes that will not be automatically backwards compatible with sites built using previous versions of the framework. To make the transition to v2.0 easier,...

Karl Williams
20 June 2019

Karl Waghorn-Moyce
13 June 2019

New release: Vanilla framework 2.0

Article Cloud and server

Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to bring you the next release of Vanilla framework: version 2.0, our most stable release to date. Since our last significant release, v1.8.0 back in July last year, we’ve been working hard to bring you new features, improve the framework and make it the most stable version

Karl Waghorn-Moyce
13 June 2019

Blog posts tagged "Vanilla"

Blog posts tagged
"Vanilla"