Design Suggestions

As part of the core apps project we want to encourage our community to create and submit designs that can be used as food for thought when our community builds the apps. The Canonical Design Team is finalizing a set of design guidelines soon, but until they arrive, here are set of suggestions to keep your design inline with the design goals of the phone.

Please note that we are primarily looking for wire-frame mock-ups of designs and not for final visual designs. Most of the visual design is automatically delivered by the SDK.

Sample Designs

Here are some example screenshots from designs created for some existing apps for the phone:

Design Suggestions

When creating your designs, please be sure to follow these guidelines:

• Always include a human-readable name for the app at the top (for example 'Events' in the image above).
• While swiping is fine inside an app, never ever depend on swiping from the edges - the edges are reserved for the main phone OS.
• Functionality that relates to each screen (e.g. adding a calendar event to a calendar) should be accessible from the menu that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. In your designs just add this menu at the bottom of the screen and indicate this.

• A core design value is that we focus as much as possible on content without cluttering up the user interface with controls, sliders, buttons and other content. Please try to follow this same design principle in your designs.

• Please only use controls that are supported by the SDK. This includes most common widgets such as buttons, scrollbars, tabs, labels etc.

How To Add a Design