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

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Lyubomir Popov
on 12 December 2022

Revisiting form elements in Vanilla Framework


Over the years, we’ve identified a number of areas for improvement when it comes to the basic building blocks of a form – inputs, buttons, etc:

  • Long-standing complaints that inputs and buttons are too similar and therefore hard to distinguish
  • “Noisiness” of long forms caused by the presence of borders around all sides of inputs and buttons

Last cycle, our proposal for updated form elements was discussed and approved, and in this iteration, we worked on implementing it in Vanilla, our front-end framework.

Before Vanilla 3.9:

After Vanilla 3.9:

  • We’ve reduced the number of borders (all around) to the minimum required to satisfy WCAG contrast ratio requirements for interactive elements
  • We’ve removed round corners from buttons and other elements, as part of a wider push to align better with the work of our Brand team
  • We’ve introduced subtle transitions when interacting with form elements

This update also affects components that build on the functionality of form elements, like our search and Filter component:

The updated style was released as part of Vanilla 3.9.0 release.

Version 3.9.0 has just been released. You can see the updated form elements in action here

Related posts


Freyja Cooper
24 April 2025

The hitchhiker’s guide to infrastructure modernization

Cloud and server Article

One of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, once said that “we are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” Whilst Adams is right about a lot of things, he got this one wrong – at least when it comes to infrastructure. As our Infra Masters 2025 event demonstrated, infrastructure ...


Canonical
23 April 2025

Canonical and Ampere announce AmpereOne® SoC certification and other partnership milestones

AI Article

Ampere and Canonical are pleased to celebrate new milestones in their ongoing partnership including the completion of Canonical’s System-on-Chip (SoC) certification on AmpereOne®, and the extension of the partnership into the AI Platform Alliance, a strategic group of full stack ecosystem partners that provide enterprise-grade curated sol ...


Canonical
17 April 2025

Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin

Canonical announcements Article

The latest interim release of Ubuntu introduces “devpacks” for popular frameworks like Spring, along with performance enhancements across a broad range of hardware. 17 April 2025 Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin,” available to download and install from ubuntu.com/download.   Ubuntu 25.04 deli ...