Raring to ringlead this cycle

28Jan13

Raring Ringtail is well under way with delicious new visual elements being dropped in all the time, and the new default wallpaper has already landed. Now it’s our turn to add some community contributed assets to the mix in the form of the wallpapers submitted by us, the users of Ubuntu.

Last cycle we limited our scope resulting in this beautiful collection.

As with last time, we’re interested in quality not quantity so we’re going to try to limit ourselves to 10 images, although an extra one did sneak in last time as he was so popular. We’ll take submissions in the Flickr group as before and don’t forget we need your image to be licensed as CC by SA. Each contributor will be limited to 1 submission to the group so choose carefully. If you change your mind later you can remove your submission and add a different one.

Otto Greenslade, lead visual designer on the desktop at Canonical, offered the following tips for a choosing or creating your images.

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 into the image
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
5. Take a look at the wallpapers guidance on the Ubuntu Wiki regarding the size of images we’re after

To shortlist from this collection 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 Freenode in #1304wallpaper to discuss the selection. 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 is 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.

So to get this show on the road here’s the outline of the process for this cycle.

• 28/01/13 – Kick off 13.04 wallpaper submission process
• 31/01/13 – First get together on #1304wallpaper at 20:00 GMT
• 08/03/13 – Submissions deadline at 18:00 GMT – Flickr group will be locked and the selection process will begin
• 14/03/13 – Deliver final selection to our kind packager extraordinaire Ken VanDine. Thanks again, Ken for offering your help.
• 21/03/13 – UI freeze , another fine selection of wallpapers should land on or before this date.

As always, ping me if you have any questions, I’ll be lurking in #1304wallpaper on freenode or leave a question in the Flickr group for wider discussion. I’ll be posting updates on our schedule here from time to time too but the Flickr group will serve as our hub.

Happy snapping!

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Filed under: open source   |  3 Comments
Tags: 13.04, canonicaldesign, process, raring ringtail, submissions, ubuntu, ubuntu artwork, wallpaper