Every two weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team will be publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you're at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for the KDE 4 port of K3b which is currently underway. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the K3b Icons Survey now.

Two weeks ago, the third edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting was held in at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland. Sponsored by KDE e.V., Boudewijn Rempt, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi from the Krita project and Gilles Caullier from the Digikam project attended this yearly conference on free graphics software.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

The Oxygen team is happy to present the final selection of 15 wallpapers that will be released with KDE 4.0. It took longer than expected to manage the
contest due to the large number of entries (around 2000), but it was our first time organising such a contest. Read on for details of the winning entries.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.

The Oxygen team has announced a
wallpaper contest. Send in your wallpaper
and it might become part of the default set of wallpapers for KDE 4.0. The
Oxygen team is solliciting contributions from the community. The jury is
nobody less than Icon GodFather David Vignoni, The Mad
Scientist Nuno Pinheiro, The Loud American Ken Wimer and Oxygen Swiss Army Knife Riccardo Iaconelli.

Krita development is in a crucial phase, we are adding fun, useful and
amazing stuff at a stunning rate. But there are things that no Krita
developer can do, because we lack the proper hardware. Krita's
renaissance started with a simple Wacom Graphire tablet, and it led to some
great new possibilities. But to implement support for modern tablet features like tilt and stylus rotation we need to buy more advanced tablets and art pens, and to make that possible, we need your help!

Image management application KPhotoAlbum has launched a splash screen contest. The contest comes with a prize of $100US straight from author Jesper's PayPal account. Some early designs are on the contest page already. The contest runs until September 15th, and after that the KPhotoAlbum community will vote on which one will be used for the next release.

K3b 1.0 is in sight and with it I would like to introduce a new default theme. Not because I don't like the current ones, but I just want K3b 1.0 to look different so that people will see the difference, not only feel it. If you are interested in creating a theme for K3b see the themes howto which describes the pictures that are needed in a complete K3b theme set. Send your entries to k3b-devel. In other artwork news one of our best community sites kde-look.org passed its fifth birthday.

The Amarok project has announced an artwork contest for their upcoming live CD, Amarok Live, for fancy new version 1.4. The contest includes among other things bootsplash screens, wallpapers and Amarok splash screens. Also the Amarok Live team would like to have a complete set with similar style for all the items listed in the Amarok wiki. This artwork contest will be opened for submission until midnight UTC ending September 1st. Amarok Live 1.4 will feature the latest Amarok release from the 1.4 'Fast Forward' series and about 20 songs from Magnatune and artists, who are distributing their music in a free way.