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.
One technology that I've actually seen bridging that gap, is Rails.
I thought Rails was just hype until I saw creative types, people who would normally hire programmers or whoever, taking ideas from start to finish on their own.
For all the things that were supposed to do exactly that (going as far back as COBOL), the first one I've seen actually *doing* it, was Rails. It's both exciting and a little scary to see people taking their ideas from concept to revenue stream (or whatever), without much fuss at all. (Yeah, I know, Rails is "opinionated", but its opinion is that you should be doing web-based apps targeted at modern browsers. It happens to have had quite good timing for a language with such opinons.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?
There's an MS office template for most things, so the submissions will most likely either be:
a) a copy of something MS already has, or
b) obscure enough to be only of use to a very small group of people....
The actual announcement is here. Its got all the details on licensing (LGPL), prizes, criteria (originality, usability, artisitc merit etc)
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Does Ascii art count?
If so, here is my submission:
O P E N
F
F
I
C
E
Catchy, aint it.
Table-ized A.I.
> 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.
I don't know about that. As a visual effects artist, a lot of my work is highly technical - but I only make money because of a highly developed sense of aesthetics. In my field at least, the line between "operators"(geeks) and "artists" grows thinner everyday.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
I would much prefer *faster startup* of bloody thing then millions of templates and clipart inside.
839*929
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Grrrrr, its "more THAN" not "more then". Encourage others to get it right by using the right phrase yourself.
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
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.
Great, now there's going to be 5k clip art images of sharks with laser beams on their heads and snakes on a plane. Here's to you, Mr. Open Office submitter dude.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!