New focus for wallpaper submissions

21Aug12

Quantal is well on the way to being the great release we’ve come to expect from Ubuntu so it’s time to add to that sheen with a set of quality wallpapers from our fantastic community. This cycle we’re going to try to make the process better than before by setting out a clearer vision for what we think will make a great set.

Firstly we’re interested in quality not quantity so we’re going to limit ourselves to 10 images on the final CD. We’ll take submissions in the Flickr group as before and don’t forget we need your image licensed as CC by SA. Each Flickr user will be limited to 1 submission to the group so choose carefully!

Secondly I’ve been speaking to Otto, the Lead visual designer at Canonical, to help ensure that what we get feels at home on the desktop. The guidance we’ll follow when selecting images to go into the release is as follows:

1. Images shouldn’t be busy and filled with too many shapes and colours, a similar tone throughout is a good rule of thumb
2. They should have a single point of focus, a single area that draws the eye in
3. We should avoid having anything on the left and top edges as this will clash with the interface elements of the Launcher and Panel
4. Try your image at different aspect ratios to make sure something important isn’t cropped out on smaller/ larger screens

To shortlist from this collection, as usual, we’ll be going to the people whose images were selected last time around to help us choose the final 10. In doing this we’ll hold a series of public IRC meetings on #1210wallpaper to discuss the selection and in those sessions we’ll get the selection team to try out the images on their own Ubuntu machines to see what they look like on a range of displays and resolutions. Anyone’s welcome to come to these sessions but please bear in mind that an outcome is needed from the time that people are volunteering and there’s usually a lot of images to get through so we’d appreciate it if there isn’t too much additional debate.

The group’s open for submissions now and we’ll close it at 5pm on the 28th August 2012 to start going through the images.

So, get all your great summer photos out and as always ping me if you have any questions. I’ll be lurking in #1210wallpaper on freenode. I hope it’s been sunnier in places other than the UK!

Filed under: open source, productivity, Uncategorized   |  10 Comments
Tags: 12.10, canonical, canonicaldesign, open source, quantal, quetzal, ubuntu, wallpaper