art.gnome.org Submission Policy

This document describes the terms under which artwork and themes should be considered for inclusion on art.gnome.org.

The most common cause of themes being rejected by art.gnome.org is that they have been submitted with an invalid URL. Please check before you submit that the URL you have entered is valid

Important note: We no longer accept nature and other wallpapers, just Gnome related stuff only! Try to understand we have a lot of nature wallpapers but we are primary Gnome related project. Feel free to submit anything you want, but it is (more than before) possible your non-gnome stuff will be refused as "Not relevent".

1. No material containing, or appearing to contain, copyright images or trademarks without permission from the author.

• We will not accept material that is distributed without permission of the copyright owner. This includes trademarks and logos. If you are using non-free copyrighted material with author's permission, let us know on upload (make a note in description or drop an e-mail), we will check it out.

2. Distribution specific themes

• art.gnome.org tries to be a distribution independant site and therefore should not be biased to one distribution over another. The logos and names of distributions are also often trademarked and inclusion on art.gnome.org would violate rule 1. Additionally these themes can often contain slander that is inappropriate for the site. In the event you have a series of artwork/icons which contains non-copyrighted distribution specific images or information and is non-slanderous matierial, it may be accepted on a submission by submission basis, however in general any such submissions will be rejected.

3. All submitted material should be relevent to the GNOME project.

• If a submission does not appear to be relevent to GNOME in any way, then at the discretion of the moderator, it may not be accepted for the site.

  Under no circumstances will pornographic, violent, illegal, or otherwise potentially offensive material be included on art.gnome.org.

4. Try to make sure any theme you submit is well thought out and complete.

• As there are now several other theme sites out there, and art.gnome.org strives to be true quality, it will have a much higher standard of acceptance. In general incomplete looking themes or highly repetitive themes (themes which are simply a colour change of an existing theme) will be rejected, in the efforts to ensure that art.gnome.org can easily represent, not a complete repository of all existing themes, but rather a wide variety of the artwork that is gnome theming.

5. All theme descriptions should be in english and relevent to the submission.

6. GDM Themes should work and appear properly at resolutions of 800x600 and higher

7. Metacity themes should apply GTK colours where appropriate, and not have a fixed colour scheme

8. GTK+ themes should not include stock icons - these should be included in the icon theme otherwise they interfere with the icon theme set by the user

9. Wallpapers must have resolution 1024x768 or higher, selected wallpaper resolution must fit image resolution and you must insert path directly to image (because of automatic downloading script).

• We no longer accept wallpapers with only 1024x768 resolution, so 1024x768 and 1280x1024 is minimum now.

  We use the following points to determine an image's quality as a wallpaper. These are taken from http://designinginterfaces.com/Deep_Background

  • Soft focus. Keep lines fuzzy and avoid too much small detail -- sharp lines interfere with readability of the content atop it, especially if that content is text or small icons. (You can kind of get away with sharp lines if they are low-contrast, but even then, text doesn't work well over them.)
  • Color gradients. Bright, saturated colors are okay, but again, hard lines between them are not. Allow colors to blend into each other. In fact, if you don't have an image to use in the background, you can create a simple color gradient in your favorite drawing tool -- it still looks better than a solid color. (You don't need to store or download pure gradients as images, either. On the Web, you can create them by repeating one-pixel-wide strips, either horizontally or vertically. In systems where you can use code to generate large areas of color, gradients are generally easy to program.)
  • Depth cues. Fuzzy detail and vertical color gradients are two features that tell our visual system about distance. To understand why, imagine a photograph of a hilly landscape -- the farther away something is, the softer and hazier the color is. Other depth cues include texture gradients (features that get smaller as they get farther away) and lines radiating from vanishing points.
  • No strong focal points. The background shouldn't compete with the main content for the user's attention. Diffuse (weak) focal points can work, but make sure they contribute to a balanced composition on the whole page, rather than distract the viewer from seeing the parts of the page they should look at instead.