Hello everyone! It’s that time of year. Spring is starting to spring out there and now’s the time to grab a camera, pick up a pencil or wet your brush and start working on wallpaper submissions for this release of Ubuntu. Every six months when a new version of everyone’s favourite free and open-source desktop is released a bunch of helpful souls get together to source beautiful images to include in the release.

This release is codenamed Vivid Vervet and for this release I think we should focus on the word Vivid. Let’s throw off the winter darkness and go for bright and exciting pictures. Let’s really make a statement in 2015. I’m keen to hear people’s ideas for how they’d like to proceed.



into the spring of things, part three by Danielle Nelson – All rights reserved

We also have something new to contend with this cycle, and that’s a phone! The BQ Ubuntu powered phone is out there and there are more to come so it’s important that we also think about these devices. I’m gathering intel as we speak on these phones and will update with more as the process continues.

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.

Images shouldn’t be too busy and filled with too many shapes and colours, a similar tone throughout is a good rule of thumb. A single point of focus in photos, a single area that draws the eye into the image, can also help you avoid something too cluttered. 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. Try your image at different aspect ratios to make sure something important isn’t cropped out on smaller/ larger screens at different resolutions. Take a look at the wallpapers guidance on the Ubuntu Wiki regarding the size of images. Our target resolution is 2560 x 1600. Break all the rules except the resolution one! 😀

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 #1504wallpaper 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.

Based on the Vivid release schedule, I think our schedule for this cycle should look like this:

15/02/15 – Kick off 15.04 wallpaper submission process.

28/02/15 – First get together on #1504wallpaper at 19:30 GMT.

06/03/15 – Submissions deadline at 18:00 GMT – Flickr group will be locked and the selection process will begin.

12/03/15 – Deliver final selection in .zip format to the appropriate bug on Launchpad.

As always, ping me if you have any questions, I’ll be lurking in #1504wallpaper on freenode, email me iain_at_ubuntu_dot_com or leave a question in the Flickr group for wider discussion, that’s probably the fastest way to get an answer.

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 whole community, thanks for contributing to Ubuntu!