Ubuntu 14.04 needs a splash of colour and you can help!

10Feb14

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! 🙂

I’m very pleased to be kicking off the next wallpaper selection process for the 14.04 release of Ubuntu coming to us fresh in April. Each release we like to include photos and illustrations produced by Ubuntu enthusiasts who are keen to see the best free and open desktop looking the best it can and we’d love your help.

As with previous submissions processes we’ve run, and in conjunction with the designers at Canonical we’ve come up with the following tips for creating wallpaper 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. A single point of focus, a single area that draws the eye into the image, can also help you avoid something too cluttered.
3. The left and top edges are home to Ubuntu’s Launcher and Panel so be careful to consider how your images look in place so as not to clash with the user interface. Try them out on your own desktop, see how they feel.
4. Try your image at different aspect ratios to make sure something important isn’t cropped out on smaller/ larger screens at different resolutions.
5. Take a look at the wallpapers guidance on the Ubuntu Wiki regarding the size of images. Our target resolution is 2560 x 1600.

To shortlist from this collection we’ll be going to the contributors whose images were selected last time around to act as our selection judges. In doing this we’ll hold a series of public IRC meetings on Freenode in #1404wallpaper 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 keep 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.

Our schedule for this cycle is as follows:

• 10/02/14 – Kick off 14.04 wallpaper submission process
• 18/02/14 – First get together on #1404wallpaper at 19:30 GMT
• 05/03/14 – Submissions deadline at 18:00 GMT – Flickr group will be locked and the selection process will begin
• 11/03/14 – Deliver final selection in zip format to the appropriate bug on Launchpad
• 13/03/14 – UI freeze for latest version of Ubuntu with our fantastic images in!

As always, ping me if you have any questions, I’ll be lurking in #1404wallpaper on freenode or leave a question in the Flickr group for wider discussion, that’s probably the fastest way to get an answer to a question.

I’ll be posting updates on our schedule here from time to time but the Flickr group will serve as our hub.

Happy snapping and scribbling and on behalf of the community, thanks for contributing to Ubuntu! 

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