Redmine

This message is about Redmine hosted at Planio. All Planio developers are also active contributors here on redmine.org and we thought you'd find this article interesting. Our intention is not to blatantly advertise Planio. If you take issue with this post or think it does not belong here, please contact me directly at jan (at) plan.io.

I've heard this over and over again by different people: "Redmine is ugly.", "It is outdated." and being both a Redmine hoster, and a big fan of Redmine, those comments always hurt a little.

And I think they're wrong. My point would in fact be: Redmine's UI is very beautiful as it is. Because it does have one main property of good design: Consistency. If you look at different areas within Redmine, you will find that the forms, buttons, links, and UI elements follow the same principles and look consistent – which I think is awesome.

Design styles like rounded corners, big buttons, skeuomorphism or flat design come and go. And there is a reason why they exist and they all have their time. But I think it's wrong to say "Redmine is ugly" just because its style isn't like the current state-of-the-art. It's an almost 10 year old project now, and still mainly a non profit effort by only a handful of contributors.

So when we set out to redesign our hosted Redmine for our Planio customers, our premise was to do it without rewriting the views, without starting from scratch and without overturning existing concepts. In fact, we built on the UI foundations that are core to Redmine and only build a Redmine theme merely – with few exceptions. One that also remains fully upstream compatible with new changes coming in Redmine.

Without further ado, here's an account by our designer Nadine Roßa on how this went down:

*The challenge of redesigning Redmine – the story behind the new Planio UI*

I hope you'll like it and we all at Planio are very interested to hear your comments.