Want to know what the Canonical Design Team is doing?

If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what's happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.

I assumed this was a fairly new thing (and I think I'm right in this assumption), but it has posts going back to 2005. Where did those posts come from? I didn't know there was a design team in 2005 ...

One thing that holds my interest is that Canonical in general, and the design team in particular, are doing usability testing on the user interface and such applications as Rhythmbox.

As somebody said in the comments to the Rhythmbox entry, this is a great way of "giving back" to open source that just happens to be something besides hacking at code.

For free, open-source software to really break out of its geeky box, we really need to celebrate and encourage contributions that go beyond coding, and I'm glad to see Canonical putting resources into areas such as design and the user experience.