How we redesigned the Linear UI (part Ⅱ) - Linear Blog

It’s always better to do a redesign quickly. Otherwise, you will block almost every project and create design debt as newly added features and screens need to be redesigned very soon after they are created. Once we had the initial direction in place, we focused a small team on the redesign: Romain and Yann led the efforts with contributions from An... See more

Today, we are revealing the result of many weeks of work redesigning Linear’s interface. We’ve adjusted the sidebar, tabs, headers, and panels to reduce visual noise, maintain visual alignment, and increase the hierarchy and density of navigation elements. These changes make space for Linear to evolve from a simple issue tracker into a purpose-buil... See more

We kept using LCH for our theme generation, as it is one of the closest color spaces to the human eye and allowed us to deal with different elevations for our surfaces (e.g. background, foreground, panels, dialogs, and modals).

I also spent time aligning labels, icons, and buttons, both vertically and horizontally in the sidebar and tabs. It was definitely a challenge given the amount of UI elements we have on this tiny surface. This part of the redesign isn’t something you’ll immediately see but rather something that you’ll feel after a few minutes of using the app.

Each afternoon, we divided the coding portions into groups of two engineers while designers iterated on other parts of the project, building a pipeline for us to work from. This daily back-and-forth between designers and engineers helped us get the first working version of the new UI by the end of the week. The result of that week’s work was added ... See more

The most pressing problems seemed to be:

1. Accommodating the product evolution


2. Enhancing the clarity of the application chrome and views


3. Improving the navigation

Even when doing concept work, you often need to focus your efforts. The design concept should feel like an exciting evolution of the product. A redesign should not completely disassemble the product to its atomic parts. While you might have ambitious goals, you also have to be realistic and manage risks.