Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org Design Contest
lisah writes, "OpenOffice.org, along with co-sponsor WorldLabel.com, will give away more then $5,000 in cash and prizes to the winners of a template and clip-art design contest scheduled to run until October 13, 2006. Organizers are looking for original designs that are useful to multiple users but, in terms of creativity, they say the sky's the limit. Submissions can range from budgeting spreadsheets and personal finance templates to funky graphics and presentation templates, but must run on one of the suite's four main applications: Writer, Calc, Draw, or Impress."
> You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Totally. Leonardo Da Vinci was a no talent hack of an artist and a pathetic technologist.
How many Leonardo Da Vinci types do you know in real life? The guy was a one off genius.
I would much prefer *faster startup* of bloody thing then millions of templates and clipart inside.
839*929
This is one of those things that people take for granted, but they come in very handy when you need them.
As a licensed Office user, you can pull down literally thousands (probably closer to 100,000) various types of clip art, stock photography, and templates. There's probably 20 different Invoice templates alone, all very good.
And with Office 2003, opening a template from the web or adding clip art is all integrated into the application.
Little things like this will help OO become more mainstream, but I think it still has a long way to go.
-David
How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?
Nothing, but these submissions are unlikely to be accepted, much less win the competition.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
as long as they don't support natively SVG.
SVG is the best standard for vectorial cliparts, and not supporting svg is really a shame. Bring real svg support to openoffice instead of the lame sun-java-only plugin, and then people will bring cliparts to openoffice.
...I wish that they had got people to design a better UI for the main app though, it just looks so much like it was designed on the cheap in 1997 ( see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Nt3_ 51-word97.png ). I know that people will say functionality should take precedence but I will not be able to convince anyone who is a casual user to switch when they will be presented with a mass of grey and cheap looking icons.
I hope that they have some money saved back to do that soon.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Wrong.
I'd even go so far and say you won't excel at either if your not good in the other. I'm a professional software developer and a multimedia designer with a diploma in arts. I'd say I'm quite good at both *and* I'm aware that both are hard work and I also know the difference between crappy programming and good programming and the difference between crappy design and good design.
The problem with being at home in both areas is that you have to force yourself on one field of expertise at a time. Right now I'm doing a project where I only do the programming side. It's wonderfull having a designer do the neat looking stuff at the frontend without me having to worry zilch about it. Especially if he's doing a good job - which he is. Not having to explain to fellow programmers that it's important that your webappp doesn't look like shit is a big bonus aswell. The other way around, the desinger doesn't know very much about programming, so I have to tell him that mixing template stuff with haphazard logic the templates provide is a bad idea - and he doesn't get it all the time. Which can be anoying.
Again, it's difficult to handle both areas at once, but in the long run you come out on top, no matter what field you focus on. MM Designers who don't know programming are a pain in the upper leagues and so are programmers who don't know nothing about design. Steve Jobs is a good example of a guy who knows his way around technical stuff and pretty design quite well. And AFAICT he's getting along.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Charles Wyble System Engineer
Agreed. Although I'm working as a developer now, my last position was doing modeling and animation. There is a lot of artistic talent involved, but I would also consider it a technical position. Working on complex scenes in Maya, I know that I spent almost as much time writing MEL as rigging, and even when your not writing code it's still no walk in the park.
You hear a lot about the relationship between music and programming. You don't hear as much about the relationship between visual people and programming, but probably because all of the really talented people in those areas are out writing software. There is an asthetic to code as well, and I think most skilled developers are aware of it, at a conscious or unconcsious level.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I would really like to have a _much_ better alternative to the pink 'n' purple graphs that are standard in MS office (and gnumeric). Who ever thought that putting purple and pink on a grey background get nice looking figures. Please, please, please, I am begging someone with a better understanding of layout to get a better set of standard colors.
>>You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
> I'd say this guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci) would disagree with you. Just to name one.
Citing a single counterexample from centuries ago when OP claimed that such individuals are very rare proves OP's point, especially when your counterexample is one data point among six billion.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.