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OpenOffice.org Design Contest

Posted by kdawson on Wed Sep 20, 2006 02:12 AM
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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."
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  • Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TechnoBunny (991156) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:28AM (#16144280)
    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....
    • "How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?"

      Nothing will stop people submitting them but peer review should weed them out once they have.

    • How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?
      Because the designers at Microsoft Office are horrid, and their presentation templates look like ass. Even if submitted and accepted, they shouldn't win anything.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LarsWestergren (9033) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @03:58AM (#16144476) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Have a look at some typical Excel graphs with their gaudy data series, clutter and heavy lines.

        Now take a look at a Tufte book.

        There is a difference.

    • How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?

      As they'll be judging on orginality, I doubt anything remotly "MS Office" would be selected. Office templates stand out like a sore thumb.... a bit like a MS Powerpoint Presentation :)

      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 gr

  • Link (Score:3, Informative)

    by arun_s (877518) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:36AM (#16144301) Homepage Journal
    The actual announcement is here [openoffice.org]. Its got all the details on licensing (LGPL), prizes, criteria (originality, usability, artisitc merit etc)

  • Ascii Art? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:39AM (#16144304) Homepage Journal
    Does Ascii art count?

    If so, here is my submission:


        O P E N
        F
        F
        I
        C
        E


    Catchy, aint it.
    • Can I use MS Paint?

    • Boo. That's ugly.

      Here's my submission:

      O F F I C E
      P
      E
      N

      That's much better.

      Please mail the check to 100 Main St, Beverly Hills, CA 90210.

      Thank you,
      Randy.

    • Slashfilters can lick my nuts.  Who are they to call 'my' computer-generated works of art "junk characters"!  But, I suppose it is no use complaining right here.  I'll show them junk characters!

      ___  ___  _ _  _  ___
      | . \| __>| \ || |/ __>
      |  _/| _> |   || |\__ \
      |_|  |___>|_\_||_|<___/

  • I can just see it no (Score:3, Funny)

    by antifoidulus (807088) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:56AM (#16144336) Homepage Journal
    The goatse man with a spreadsheet emerging from...well....not a cell I would go into...
  • ...but what about the countless other sources of graphics and pictures which may be proprietory/copyrighted? What's preventing anyone from taking one and submitting it. I'd imagine the potential nightmare of lawsuits and litigation to follow if even one picture is caught. And who takes THAT liability?

  • OOo (Score:3, Insightful)

    by should_be_linear (779431) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @03:03AM (#16144348)
    I would much prefer *faster startup* of bloody thing then millions of templates and clipart inside.

  • more THAN (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ados (513748) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @03:27AM (#16144400)
    Grrrrr, its "more THAN" not "more then". Encourage others to get it right by using the right phrase yourself.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by egr (932620)
        it's ""it's" (it is) - not "its"" - not "it's "it's" - not "its" (it is)"
      • "In this case" indeed. I can't believe how common "its" -> "it's" is, even among journalists. It has to be the grammar mistake online.

  • Clip art and Templates (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DavidD_CA (750156) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @03:30AM (#16144410) Homepage
    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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DavidD_CA (750156)
        I think you've got something there. A massive "open" library of all sorts of document templates, images, clip art, photos, etc, would be fantastic.

        Ideally it could be linked into applications like OO through various HTTP APIs or something, much like Office is. (When you install office, you only install about 300 MB of clip art, the rest of it is accessed from the web.)
  • They should pay more attention to the interface first and get a good usability specialist. Basic thing are much harder to do than they should be, like there is no keyboard shortcut for automatic sum in Calc! After googling I found out that you actually need to create a macro to do that. Maybe this one was fixed in the most recent releases (haven't checked), but there MANY things like that they should focus on.
    • So submit a bug, and watch it's progress.
      Many of the people who write code, have no real need for a spreadsheet, so they have very little idea what features real users actually need unless those users tell them!

  • Openoffice doesn't deserve cliparts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2006, @04:07AM (#16144496)
    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 agree wholeheartedly. I find it infuriating that OOo doesn't support SVG. As a chemist I often prepare drawings of molecules and reaction pathways from specialist programs whose best output is in SVG. At least Abiword with a plugin inserts SVG graphics with a plugin that internally converts them to PNG. Not an optimal solution since they don't scale as they internally as bitmaps, but still its better than nothing.
    • "as long as they don't support natively SVG"

      Google on OO and feetures. Select random feeture. Post I like OO except it doesn't have 'X feeture' on Slashdot.

      SVG-ready [ipd.uka.de] OpenOffice 2.0

      was re Re:Openoffice doesn't deserve cliparts

  • clip art... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joe 155 (937621) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @04:48AM (#16144575) Journal
    ...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 [wikimedia.org] ). 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 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"

      You know something, when I read the opening comment I said to myself, standby for a mass of OO doesn't have 'feeture' comments that strangely get modded up. And straight off at number four is the above ..

      was Re:clip art...
      • Thats the primary reason why the *ribbon* exists.

        I thought that the ribbon is having a hard time getting accepted.

        The menu-bar paradigm is OLD older than me and older than lots of you.

        ouch.

        Just because it's old doesn't mean that there's anything overly wrong with it (if you think about it, most things in computing are "old" by your standards). A few apps might be pushing the paradigm to it's limits, but then you have to wonder if maybe it's the apps that need to be simplified and not the menubar.

        why not rem

  • Dear OpenOffice (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pembo13 (770295) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @05:24AM (#16144658) Homepage

    You have a long way to go. Clipart is the least of your problems: there is always images.google.com. I never really used MS Office much. I used Novel, and then Corel Office. When I moved to Linux I picked you up OO.org. You meet most of my tasks, and I have never had to open MS Word due to a a lack of yours. However, you are lacking a lot of useful features. Please copy features from Wordperfect. I would love a grammar checker as useful as the one in Wordperfect.

    And I hear you don't have native SVG support? What's up with that?

    Thank you.

    • Forget about svg support, I'd be happy to see correct formatting of text using font substitution and correct handling of combining diacritics. Yes, I've posted bugs. Yes, I'm bitter and twisted.

      But also yes, I use OpenOffice daily. It's just better.

    • Here is my OpenOffice.org dear to letter:

      Dear OpenOffice.org people,

      ash-fox@Tapestry:~$ sudo apt-get install openclipart
      Password:
      Reading package lists... Done
      Building dependency tree... Done
      The following extra packages will be installed:
      openclipart-openoffice.org openclipart-png openclipart-svg
      Suggested packages:
      gimp-svg inkscape sketch
      Recommended packages:
      librsvg2-bin
      The following NEW packages will be installed:
      openclipart       openclipart-openoffice.

  • ....forgotten in the contest rules .... talking paper clips are not allowed!

  • Shark Art (Score:4, Funny)

    by farker haiku (883529) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @07:22AM (#16145020) Journal
    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.
  • I like OO except for the lack of a good User Interface, the grey and cheep icons, no native SVG support, no keyboard shortcut for automatic sum in Calc, no propagate deleting of paragraphs, no visible page breaks, slow startup ...

  • Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by varghan (834564)
    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.

    • Re:Geeks don't do art. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fishbowl (7759) <`nethack' `at' `cox.net'> on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:26AM (#16144277)

      >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.)


      • 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.


        Noooooo! Don't cross the streams!

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Fred_A (10934)
        One technology that I've actually seen bridging that gap, is Rails.
        I'm not sure stuff like the TMRC [mit.edu] qualifies as artistry. I guess it's a matter of perspective though...

    • Re:Geeks don't do art. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:46AM (#16144317)
      > 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.
      • Nerds lack a sense of irony, which is why you were modded down. However, you're actually partially right [timesonline.co.uk]: Leonardo was a quite poor scientist and technologist.

    • Re:Geeks don't do art. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by snicho99 (984884) on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:58AM (#16144340)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by miyako (632510)
        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 progr
    • Damnd I misread.... I guess the Clippy design contest will be a long time coming.

    • Wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Qbertino (265505)
      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 bo
    • Yeah, who does that Da Vinci guy think he is?! Get in line with the rest of us!
    • I am working on an art minor [deviantart.com] and I'm still good enough technically to be worth ~$25/hr for a mere summer internship (with IBM! where they say my code is awesome. :P) and to write my own website mini-CMS from scratch to re-learn XSLT and...

      Now, granted, my art stuff isn't quite as good as my little sister's stuff [antoninawhaples.com], but I think I'm working on it and getting better. (Sorry I don't have any scans of stuff from my current art class or anything - and if you go browsing the Scraps hard enough, you'll find some stuf

    • The usual oversight with these reactionary comments a la "OMG, Microsoft shouldn't work on the Vista UI while there are still so many bugs!!12"...

      Programmers are generally not artists.
      Artists are generally not programmers.

      Don't worry, the developers will keep working on OOo.

      Meanwhile, why not give some artists some work they can do?

      Sorry if I'm harsh, but I've seen that kind of argument a million times by now, and the reason it's flawed is so super simple to understand that it's downright scary how often it

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