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 22 February 2013


When designing an app, an important thing to consider in your app is how to display content.

In our design guidelines, we have provided three standard views: Grid, List and Full screen which we think will cover most situations.

Grid view

Content divided into rows and columns is referred to as a grid view.

  • The grid view extends vertically.

List view

Content divided into rows is referred to as a list view and can attain a variety of appearances and behaviours.

  • The list view extends vertically.
  • List items can be grouped and styled differently.

Thinking of using this one? Look at the “List items” building block.

Full screen view

When a single piece of content is the main focus of the user’s attention, you should consider displaying the content in full screen view using the full screen layout.

This view looks like it needs some navigation

To navigate back to the previous view, use the page stack navigation structure.

And what about scrolling?

Scrollbars are hidden until you actually need them, so they appear on touch. The scrollbar is applied automatically whenever there is content out of view.

Ask us about content views!

Join our mailing list. We’d love to hear from you!

Related posts


Maximilian Blazek
10 November 2025

Generating accessible color palettes for design systems … inspired by APCA!

Ubuntu Article

This is the first of two blog posts about how we created the color palette for a new design system at Canonical. In this post I share my journey into perceptually uniform color spaces and perceptual contrast algorithms.  If you’re already familiar with these concepts, skip to this section (or visit the Github repository) to ...


Leia Ruffini
9 September 2025

How we ran a sprint to refresh our design website, Part 2

Design Article

Part 2 of our series on how our team created content for our design website. Get insights, tools, and lessons to help you run your own design sprint. ...


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 ...