Skip to main content

Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close

An error occurred while submitting your form. Please try again or file a bug report. Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 16 July 2015


We have given our monochromatic icons a small facelift to make them more elegant, lighter and consistent across the platform by incorporating our Suru language and font style.

The rationale behind the new designs are similar to that of our old guidelines, where we have kept to our recurring font patterns but made them more streamlined and legible with lighter strokes, negative spaces, and a minimal solid shape.

What we have changed:

  • Reduced and standardized the strokes width from 6 or 8 pixels to 4.
  • Less solid shapes and more outlines.
  • The curvature radius of rectangles and squares has been slightly reduced (e.g message icon) to make them less ‘clumsy’.
  • Few outlines are ‘broken’ (e.g bookmark, slideshow, contact, copy, paste, delete) for more personality. This negative space can also represent a shadow cast.

 

Less solid shapes

Before

After

Lighter strokes

 

Before

After

Negative spaces

 

Before

 

After

 

Font patterns 

Oblique lines are slightly curved

Arcs are not perfectly rounded but rather curved

 

Uppercase letters use right or sharp angles

Vertical lines have oblique upper terminations.

Nice soft curves

 

Action

Devices

Indicators

Weather

Related posts


Erin Conley
10 July 2025

In pursuit of quality: UX for documentation authors

Documentation Article

Canonical’s Platform Engineering team has been hard at work crafting documentation in Rockcraft and Charmcraft around native support for web app frameworks like Flask and Django. It’s all part of Canonical’s aim to write high quality documentation and continuously improve it over time through design and development processes. One way we i ...


Lyubomir Popov
23 June 2025

Improving our web page creation workflow: how structured content is slashing design and development time

Ubuntu Article

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. The challenge: brid ...


Leia Ruffini
14 April 2025

How we ran an effective sprint to refresh our design website, Part 1

Design Article

Part 1 of how we ran a design sprint to refresh our website. Sharing what worked, what didn’t, and lessons from designing for open source in mind. ...