KOffice Icon Contest

The KOffice developers have been making outstanding progress towards their goal of creating a useful, powerful and reliable KDE office suite. But whereas the technology
in KOffice has been steadily improving, its visual appearance has not been keeping pace. To address this issue, the KOffice development team is pleased to announce the KOffice Icon Contest. This contest is being held to ensure that KOffice 1.3 not only works better but also looks better than any previous release.

Aim of the KOffice Icon Contest

One of the goals of KOffice 1.3 is to deliver an improved user interface that compliments the progress being made by the KOffice developers in the code. Icons and related artwork are a vital part of that interface improvement.

Entering The Contest

The KOffice Icon Contest is open to everyone. All submissions from individuals or teams of artists that meet the guidelines for the contest are welcome.

To participate, the following materials should be sent as a single submission to the contest organizer Ismail Donmez ([email protected])
and the KOffice users list ([email protected]):

  1. A single screenshot showing all of the icons in the submission. The individual icons in the screenshot should be either 22x22 or 32x32 pixels in size.
  2. An FTP or Web URL from which the icons can be downloaded. Please do not email the icons themselves!

The Icons

The icons should be provided in a single compressed archive containing icons for each of the following KOffice applications:

  • KOShell (Koffice work area)
  • KWord (Word processor)
  • KSpread (Spreadsheet)
  • KPresenter (Presentation program)
  • Krita (Bitmap graphic editor)
  • Karbon14 (Vector graphic (SVG) editor)
  • KFormula (Mathematical formula editor)
  • Kugar & Kugar Designer (Report creator)
  • Kivio (Flow chart and diagram editor)

The icons for each application should include:

  • an application icon which will appear in the KMenu and elsewhere
  • toolbar and menu icons
  • icons for use in dialogs such as the new document and configuration dialogs

All icons must be supplied in both 22x22 and 32x32 sizes. The application icons must also be supplied in 48x48, 64x64 and 128x128 sizes. The preferred icon format is SVG though PNG is also acceptable. The preferred icon style is Crystal SVG.

Artists should use KOffice 1.2.1 or later (e.g. KOffice from CVS) in creating their submissions. You may further wish to review the old KDE Icon Style Guide although portions of it have now been obsoleted with the adoption of Crystal SVG.

Licensing of Submissions

Just as with the official KDE icons, all icons submitted to the contest must be licensed under the LGPL. All submitted icons must also belong to the artist(s) who submit them. Icons belonging any other 3rd party will not be accepted.

Contest Timeline

The KOffice Icon Contest will be open for submissions for two (2) months starting February 20, 2003. At the end of those two months all of the submissions will be examined by KOffice developers and users and the winning submission will be announced by the KOffice development team a week later.

The Prize

The award for winning the KOffice Icon Contest is to have your icons distributed along with KOffice as its official icons and an acknowledgement of contribution in all of the KOffice programs.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by fault (not verified)

> And that means I should use Adobe Image Ready which is used by Crystal icon team?

Sodipodi is completely ready to create such icons.. I'm not sure why you said it's not.. what are it's missing features? I've created quite complicated things in Sodipodi before.

That being said, Adobe Image Ready is still probably the best tool for the job, if you have it, have windows/macosx, and are still willing to use Adobe products (heh... virtually all artists have to... adobe does create very nice products)

by Antialias (not verified)

'Sodipodi is completely ready to create such icons..'

No, it is not. I've tried every and each release (compiled) and always had strange crushes when I wanted to save my work. And you can imagine how frustrated one can be when spending a lot of time to create an icon and it get lost because the application crushes when you want to save you work.

'Adobe Image Ready is still probably the best tool for the job...'

Probably.

'if you have it, have windows/macosx, and are still willing to use Adobe products'

I don't have it (Adobe Image Ready), I don't have windows/macosx anymore. I'm actually waiting for Carbon to get ready and I hope it will be ready very soon.

by Dirceu (not verified)

sorry
but crystal is wonderfull

if you don't like crystal because you don't create a theme of icons better?
I am saddened in seeing people like you criticizing the good work done in crystal icons

by Hakenuk (not verified)

Why doesn't KOffice 1.3 integrate TOra rather than Kexi?

by lucijan (not verified)

because:

1) koffice know about TOra while including kexi
2) nobady contacted the koffice team and requested a include of tora
3) TOra aims at database-power users only, kexi is done for more trivial purposes e.g. personal and small buissines
4) kexi is based on the koffice-framework

that's it :)

lucijan

by .coder (not verified)

Hi all!

Does KOffice support XML? That is, what is the structure of files KOffice genrates? Because, XML would give us readibility, portability, flexibility, etc...

Sincerely!

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

KOffice files for current versions are .zip's of a few XML files. (Older versions used tar.gz's of XML files)

by chris (not verified)

Call for developers.

You all know KOffice needs more developers. If you can do something you can help bringing koffice on par with MS Office or Staroffice.

I would code if i had time sorry :-( :( :-)

go go go

by Norbert (not verified)

You don't need that much time: there are many very small things to do.
Every small piece helps

by GuestX (not verified)

I'd rather see stability from KOffice, myself. Here are some things which could be improved:

The spreadsheet: it isn't as slow as it was when loading files, but it still crashes when doing basic stuff such as copying and pasting. Fortunately, it saves recovery files as it goes.

The word processor: try importing a 50 page RTF file, and there's no need to call OpenOffice.org slow any more - you can easily load OpenOffice.org, load the RTF file, probably even read it yourself, save it as something else, and quit before KWrite has done anything.

Now, I use KSpread for various things, but what KOffice really needs is more focus on stability and reliability before people get over-interested in tarting it up. Myself, I'd even contribute to the development if I didn't have a huge list of other things that I'd also be interested in contributing to. Meanwhile, I don't think it's incomprehensible that KDE developers get a bad reputation, *despite* their hard work in producing something as useful as KDE is, because it's the flashy, clever stuff that seems to get developer/community attention rather than the more noble objective of being able to trust your data to various applications.

As it is, I *just* *about* trust my data to KSpread, but it would be nice to trust KSpread just a bit more.

by Randy (not verified)

Suggestions for stability improvments are great. Maybe they are having this contest so that the developers can concentrate on that and have people who like doing stuff like making icons do them.

I think this is a great idea. They letting the developer of KOffice work on the code and asking for people with talents in graphics design to make the icons.

by GuestX (not verified)

Yes, let's hope that the essentials get a bit more attention. After all, an office suite can look really good, but it's useless if it crashes, loses data and behaves badly. Still, KOffice has come on a lot over the past year or so.

by Antialias (not verified)

1. How about stencil sets for Kivio? & thread

2. Has it ever been discussed if Scribus should be part of KOffice? & thread

3. KDE and Linux printing in general SUCKS HORRIBLY. & thread

4. Why is kexi not part of the content? & thread

5. Why doesn't KOffice 1.3 integrate TOra rather than Kexi? & thread

6. Does KOffice support XML? & thread

7. I'd rather see stability from KOffice, myself. Here are some things which could be improved... & thread

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I thought we were discussing Koffice Icon Contests here, but 85 % of postings are off topic.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> I thought we were discussing Koffice Icon Contests here, but 85 % of postings are off topic.

Very true, please use http://kde-forum.org/ for postings not related to news stories.