With the Ubuntu Wallpaper contest wound up and the winners due to be announced shortly, the other part of the wallpaper puzzle, the default, has been revealed.

Canonical design team member Michal Izydorczyk shared the image earlier today under the title of ‘Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Wallpaper’. While its not immediately clear if this is the new default wallpaper, or just a work in-progress design., what it is is a marked improvement over the current design.

Wallpaper, Meet Suru

Borrowing cues from the new ‘Suru‘ design language being rolled out to Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets, it both looks and feels like a logical progression of the infamous and oft-mocked default wallpapers foisted on users for the last million releases.

In the update Michal explains:

”For the last couple of weeks we’ve been working on the new Ubuntu Wallpaper. The wallpaper has become an integral part of the ubuntu brand, the strong colours and gradated flow are powerful important elements. We realised this when looking from a distance at someone laptop it really does shout UBUNTU.”

Continuing:

“We spent some time …thinking how to connect the old with the new and how to make the transition smooth. When we got the composition right we started to play with colours, we tried all our Ubuntu complimentary colours but we were not entirely happy [as they] didn’t feel like a next step from our last wallpaper…”

Does this new wallpaper do that? I think yes, but the real test will come April when it lands on millions of desktops the world over.