KDE Visual Design Group/Plasma 5.18 Wallpaper Competition

Read everything on this page very carefully before entering your submission.

Rules

1. The deadline for submissions is January 15th 2020, at midnight UTC time. The winning wallpaper will be selected on January 22nd 2020.
2. Your wallpaper must be original and created specifically for the contest.
3. Your wallpaper must be released to KDE under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.
4. You can submit up to 3 wallpapers.
5. Images must be in PNG format.
6. The source files used to create the wallpaper should be shared in a non-proprietary format, like an Inkscape-compatible SVG, .blend, .kra, .xfc, etc.
7. The minimum required size for wallpapers is 4K (3840x2160), although 5K (5120x2880) is preferred.
8. A phone-sized (1080x2280) wallpaper for Plasma Mobile can also be submitted.
9. Image files must be hosted on an external (non-KDE) site without compression. Two sites that host images without compression for free are imgbox.com and postimages.org. You can also upload it to your preferred cloud storage provider, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
10. Any users that submits wallpapers that are racist, sexist, demeaning, or inappropriate in any way will be disqualified.
11. The organizers will disqualify and erase any entry that is copied from elsewhere with no or minimum changes or violates third parties' copyrights.
12. Disqualifications and deletions are final and cannot be recurred.

Design Guidance & Suggestions

1. Consider making a wallpaper that provides a sense of continuity with the current "Ice Cold" wallpaper. Your wallpaper should feel like images on a timeline with Ice Cold.
2. Do not add the Plasma version number (5.18) into your wallpaper.
3. Any words or logos should not be simply overlaid on the wallpaper. If you add words or logos, integrate them into the design of the wallpaper.

The six following wallpapers, made by Ken Vermette and Santiago César, are used in previous versions of Plasma. You can find Ken Vermette's work on this page.

• 

  Ice Cold (Plasma 5.16 & 5.17)

• 

  Cluster (Plasma 5.14 & 5.15)

• 

  Kokkini (Plasma 5.13)

• 

  Opal (Plasma 5.11 & 5.12)

• 

  Cascade (Plasma 5.10)

• 

  Canopée (Plasma 5.9)

Selection Process

A jury of members in KDE's Visual Design Group and other KDE community members will judge submitted wallpapers. After the end of the given time for submissions, six finalists will be selected for a second round. Users that make it to this stage get a prize from Tuxedo Computers. The second round will last one week. In the second round, the judges may ask for tweaks to the wallpapers to make them even better. After the second round ends, the winning wallpaper will be selected. There will only be one winning wallpaper, but other wallpapers may be included as optional wallpapers in Plasma 5.18, or used in future releases. The jury's decision is final.

Prize

Tuxedo Computers is sponsoring prizes for all the finalists who make it to the second round. The packages will vary, but they will all include:

1. A KDE baseball cap
2. A plush Tux
3. KDE stickers
4. A frozen glass coffee mug

The grand prize, also sponsored by our friends at Tuxedo Computers, is an InfinityBook Pro 14, featuring a powerful Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD. It also features an all-day battery life of 12 hours. It weighs just 1.4kg (3lbs) and is 19mm (0.7in) thin. Naturally, it will come decked out with the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 desktop, the winning wallpaper, and a bunch of great software made by KDE.

Help and Feedback

You can ask the VDG for help and feedback any time during the competition! Just join the #kde-vdg channel on Matrix or the freenode IRC channel (which is bridged to the VDG Telegram room, if you prefer Telegram).

Also check out the discussion in the competition's subforum to get tips and feedback.

Current Entries

Start here!