Ubuntustudio 16.04 Wallpaper Contest

Ubuntustudio 16.04 will be officially released in April 2016. In order to offer an excellent customer experience on the desktop, the Ubuntustudio community will host a wallpaper design contest. The contest, open to all Digital Artists, especially Ubuntustudio enthusiasts and Ubuntu users, will collect the 16 most beautiful, innovative and downright slick desktop wallpapers. Each artist may submit up to 4 pieces, and the Ubuntustudio community will vote on and select the new Ubuntustudio Wallpapers! (See what we did there? 16? 4? Clever, eh?) So, come on, everyone! Design! Paint! Edit! Compose! Draw! Adapt! Shoot!

Contest Schedule

• Submit Entries: January 15, 2016 - March 15, 2016
• Review and voting: March 16, 2016 - March 20, 2016
• Results Announcement: March 25, 2016

Entry Submission

Please submit your works:

• TO: creativelinux@flickr.com

• CC: linux4creativehumans@yahoo.com

• SUBJECT: Xenial Xerus Wallpaper Contest

Include your contact information, and a 50 word title and description of your work. You should include production notes e.g. "Created in Blender".

Content Rules

• No illustrations some may consider inappropriate, offensive, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libelous.
• No sexually explicit or provocative images.
• No images of weapons or violence.
• No alcohol, tobacco, or drug use imagery.
• No designs which promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against groups or individuals; or promotes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
• No religious, political, or nationalist imagery.
• No version numbers as some may prefer to continue to use your theme with an older version of Ubuntu.
• No branding assets like “Ubuntu CoF” or text to permit use by derivative distributions.

Composition

• Avoid high frequency images. ( A soft focus is one way to achieve this )
• Designs must accommodate the XFCE dock which is located at the bottom of the display.

Constraints

• The final dimension should be 2560 x 1600 pixels.

• Submissions must adhere to the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 license.

• Attribution must be declared if the submission is based on another design.

Screen Resolution and Aspect Ratio

It is important to note the diversity of displays which Ubuntustudio needs to support. Although the desired image format is 2560 x 1600 pixels the composition should support a variety of image formats.

Typical screen resolutions:

Desktops

Laptops

Tablets

Background Guidelines

• No version numbers. Some individuals may desire to use an older theme, or use the latest theme in their older version of Ubuntustudio. Let your submission be about choice and do not use version numbers in your artwork.
• Avoid text, it calls for attention too much and will likely look bad when scaled. Plus it can't be translated easily.
• Be careful with small patterns, they might become uneven when scaled.
• Consider how the wallpaper will interact with the panels, icons and windows.

File Formats

• Use PNG format for bitmap files (ie any files in which fewer colors are repeated throughout, especially when the colors are in large blocks). Use JPGs for photos and final images in order to reduce the file size, as this format can cause visible compression artefacts.
• Make the XCF source files available, if you happen to work with GIMP
• Use SVG for vector art.
• Work generated with proprietary applications like Photoshop and Illustrator is acceptable, but files in their formats are useless for many of us. In other words it is HIGHLY ADVISABLE to design in and work with F/Loss tools!

Templates

An SVG template for use with Inkscape and an XCF template for GIMP. Both have a 2560 x 1600 pixel canvas to use the largest commonly offered resolution, currently. "Passepartout" layers allow to see how things will look when this space is cropped to conform to other common aspect ratios.

This simulates the effect the "Style: Zoom" setting in "Appearance Preferences: Background" will have: the image is scaled up or down such that it fills the screen without distorting it. If the aspect ratio of the image is wider than that of the screen, it will be scaled to the same height and the areas on the side will be cropped. If the aspect ratio of the image is taller than that of the screen, it will be scaled to the same width and the areas on top and bottom will be cropped.

CategoryArtwork