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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: Join in!

By Smashing Editorial, March 19th, 2008 in Events | 119 Comments | Forum

Few weeks ago we’ve presented a wallpaper calender for March 2008 — a desktop wallpaper designed by Patricia Villanueva, a 29-year-old graphics designer from Mexico-City. We’ve stumbled upon Patricia’s works which have impressed us by her bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but genuinely creative and unusual style. Being fair, we would also like to give you the opportunity to present your work in our magazine.

How do I participate?

You have some excellent ideas for a desktop wallpaper? We are genuinely curious what you’ll come up with. Please consider the following guidelines:

choose any theme you like — typography, art, abstract, illustration, photography — it’s up to you, but the calendar should be in English,
design a wallpaper in the following resolutions (as many as possible, minimum 5): most popular resolutions are 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1440×900 and 1024×768 px, 1920×1200 and 320×480px (iPhone) (please notice step 5).
design wallpapers in two versions: the ones which contain a calendar for the upcoming month (in March only wallpapers with April calendars will be accepted) and the ones which don’t contain it (so the wallpapers remain useful even years after they’ve been released),
make sure the wallpapers contain a Smashing Magazine logo (.zip, updated, 0.68 Mb) which is clearly visible on all wallpapers; you may also place your logo on the wallpaper if you want to,
download this form (.zip, with a plain text-file form.txt inside) and fill it in (it is a necessary step),
name your files according to the format “month-year-title_of_the_theme-[calendar/nocal]-resolution.[jpg/png]“. Examples: “october-08-sad-autumn-calendar-1680x1050.jpg” (with calendar) and “october-08-sad-autumn-nocal-1680x1050.jpg” (without calendar). Files with wrong file names will be removed!
send the e-mail with your wallpapers and the form.txt-file at the latest two days before the end of a month at contest@smashingmagazine.com with the subject “[Desktop Wallpaper Calendar] Month, Theme_title”,
wallpapers which will be featured in our magazine will be available for free download and will contain a link to the artist’s blog or portfolio.

What do we expect?

Please feel free to browse through our selection of desktop wallpapers to get the intuition behind what is needed to get featured on Smashing Magazine. Please consider that not every wallpaper will be published as we’ll carefully analyze each work and will select only those wallpapers which have some creative and artistic potential. In order to be featured, the wallpapers need to have some idea, not the pure advertising of a designer who created it.

A desktop wallpaper from our recent selection.

The wallpapers will be published in the beginning of every month for the next 12 months. Notice that we respect the ideas and motivation behind artists’ work which is why we give you the full freedom to explore your creativity through your work. And this is also why the theme of the wallpaper isn’t anyhow influenced by us, but designed from scratch by yourself.

Feel free to design bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but creative, unusual and absolutely stunning wallpapers.

Smashing designing, folks!

Published in Events, March 19th, 2008
Tags: calendars, smashing, wallpapers

1.

Mike (March 19th, 2008, 6:40 am)

Excellent idea! I’ll definetely join.
2.

Haungo (March 19th, 2008, 7:27 am)

Sounds awesome! Hopefully I can find some time.
3.

nikola (March 19th, 2008, 7:30 am)

great idea … waiting for results …
4.

James (March 19th, 2008, 7:39 am)

Cool, this sounds fun, I might have a go later.
5.

pokedstudio (March 19th, 2008, 7:45 am)

Sounds great will give some of my wallpapers a go.

cheers

jon
6.

Carla (March 19th, 2008, 8:00 am)

You’re design work is amazing, i am loving the wallpapers - i’m probably no match tho ;-(
7.

Yurgen (March 19th, 2008, 8:45 am)

The smashing magazine logo isn’t very usefull, because of the white background and none vector.
8.

Leannekera (March 19th, 2008, 9:00 am)

This is because last months was shit isn’t it?

Hmmm maybe ill create one with Elephants and Handbags…
9.

CTG (March 19th, 2008, 9:02 am)

Hopefully I’ll get a free afternoon to submit something.
10.

CelebrityCast (March 19th, 2008, 9:44 am)

Great idea, I won’t miss the contest this time!
11.

Ben Jacob (March 19th, 2008, 10:09 am)

Good Idea.. So the readers can also participate with the SM Journey
12.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (March 19th, 2008, 10:10 am)

@Leannekera: please have respect for artists and their works. We’d be glad to feature your wallpapers in one of our upcoming posts.
13.

Shaun (March 19th, 2008, 12:12 pm)

I sense jealousy.
14.

Leannekera (March 19th, 2008, 1:10 pm)

@Vitaly & Sven: lol touche!

My apologies all, good luck to everyone who enters I look forward to seeing some great talent this month! :)
15.

Vin Thomas (March 19th, 2008, 2:33 pm)

Fun stuff. However, it would be nice to remove the white easily from the logo.
16.

Brian (March 19th, 2008, 3:50 pm)

If Smashing Magazine would organize the calendar naming structure, I bet the script could be modified to work.

Mac only.

Here is an action/script that sets your desktop to the current calendar. Link [www.fairlyuseless.com]
17.

atique (March 20th, 2008, 1:34 am)

wow..nice…i hope there’s a girly wallpaper calendar
18.

Yurgen (March 20th, 2008, 4:01 am)

But is isn’t vector based so it looks not that nice if you desing in Illustrator.
19.

Tephlon (March 20th, 2008, 5:25 am)

Thirded or fourthed the request for a Vectorial Smashing Magazine Logo.
20.

Cameron (March 20th, 2008, 6:56 am)

Haha… yeah, you said it!
21.

Rules Ever-M.Senthil Kumar (March 20th, 2008, 7:50 am)

Great..I will surely join
22.

Cory von Wallenstein (March 20th, 2008, 8:20 am)

I don’t suppose there is a specific RSS feed to view the submissions? I didn’t see one…
23.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (March 20th, 2008, 10:25 am)

@all who wanted the vector-based version of our logo: we’ve contacted the designer who has created the logo for us — we hope we’ll be able to get a vector-based version as well. However, please notice that the Freehand file is included in the package and is actually a vector-based logo.

@Cory von Wallenstein: no, there is no specific RSS feed to track the submissions.
24.

Braintrove.com (March 20th, 2008, 12:11 pm)

Look forward to the results.
25.

Mons (March 22nd, 2008, 4:54 am)

wow..nice…
26.

Shobhit Saxena (March 23rd, 2008, 11:52 pm)

Sounds awesome! I will surely join…
27.

kristarella (March 24th, 2008, 11:10 pm)

Are we allowed to post our entries on our own blog or deviantArt or are they supposed to be Smashing Magazine only downloads?
28.

sandie sørensen (March 24th, 2008, 11:53 pm)

I’ll try to give it a go too.
I like the concept!

I really look forward to seing all the different contributions.
29.

Drewlface (March 25th, 2008, 3:10 pm)

Awesome! I’m absolutely going to get busy with this one!
30.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (March 26th, 2008, 2:12 am)

We’ve updated the Smashing Logo package with an .ai-file now. You can download the whole package here: Link [88.198.60.17]. Thank you.
31.

sandie sørensen (March 26th, 2008, 4:42 am)

Uhm…
I didn’t really get the email-adress where I should send my work to?
32.

kristarella (March 26th, 2008, 8:08 pm)

sandie, it’s the bit in italic in point 8:
editor at smashingmagazine dot com
Just replace the small words with the bits that you know are supposed to go in an email address.
33.

sandie sørensen (March 27th, 2008, 11:27 pm)

thanks…
I knhow about the dot com, but I don’t knw about “editor at SM”- how do I write that as an email?
34.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (March 29th, 2008, 3:24 am)

@Sandie: you should replace ‘at’ with ‘@’ and ‘SM” with ’smashingmagazine’.
35.

http://lolita.blogg.se (June 1st, 2008, 1:27 am)

Yes, I’ll definetely join!
Never done a desktop wallpaper before but I think that I can come up with a really girly fashion inspired wallpaper! :)
36.

EIII (July 1st, 2008, 1:24 am)

will try to participate too.
cheers.
37.

Rik (August 2nd, 2008, 1:53 am)

Just sent mine in…. Phantasmagorical!!
38.

Juz (September 2nd, 2008, 7:29 am)

I’ve just realised how much I admire your comments design and style, the colours and design are very calm and respective to the page content, however your current footer is a bit rough- header is graphical why not the footer?

I’ll try to enter when I get time too, just one more question:
Is your site a blog, like run by wordpress or something? It is really cool and I love your site.
39.

aurel (September 5th, 2008, 6:50 am)

i was wondering if we can only use the S as a logo, as i tried to design a wallpaper and if i only use the S then it would fit nicely in the overall image and if i use the “smashing magazine” as well then i would need to love it around,

thanks
40.

ooo.. (September 8th, 2008, 3:36 am)

heytttt
41.

WAcreative (October 4th, 2008, 9:45 am)

Mac doesn’t like 31+ characters in the file name. Anyway we can get a different file naming format?
42.

Val (October 15th, 2008, 5:50 am)

Count me in! :-)
43.

Peter Gavrilov (October 16th, 2008, 6:10 am)

I am in!
44.

rC (October 29th, 2008, 1:47 am)

plz tell me that what is the email, where the wallpapers have to sent,

plz tell me.
45.

AestheticRain (November 2nd, 2008, 2:28 pm)

I’ve been a huge fan of SM wallpapers, expect a submission for December :)
46.

kashyap (November 28th, 2008, 9:19 am)

Sent them now..wondering if it isn’t too late!
47.

reezluv (December 31st, 2008, 1:16 am)

I will join and submit my artwork here..thanks man!
48.

Ernest Ojeh (January 3rd, 2009, 8:28 am)

“write a brief description of the wallpaper, the motivation behind the design, the country you come from and your URL”

- should we put that in a .txt file or write it in the email?
49.

Srish Agrawal (January 4th, 2009, 1:32 am)

Instead of participating as an individual, can I participate as a company?
50.

ankush (January 10th, 2009, 4:16 am)

its really nice..!!!!
51.

Saarah (February 13th, 2009, 3:26 pm)

Can we submit more than one?
52.

Carlo (February 28th, 2009, 1:55 am)

Great, I love your wallpapers!
53.

reginatu (March 9th, 2009, 7:57 pm)

they quite good.
Thanks.
54.

Patrice (March 28th, 2009, 6:36 am)

I just post my wallpapers with calendars for April2009!

Hope you will enjoy.
55.

AYANO (March 29th, 2009, 10:54 pm)

I’ll give it a try.. even though I don’t think I’ll have a fighting chance against the other SM users. :D
56.

miniMAC (April 6th, 2009, 2:58 am)

Oh! Yeees! Very nice! :)
57.

Tassadar (April 11th, 2009, 5:21 am)

how can i find a calendar template for photoshop (.psd file) ?
58.

Hadret (April 27th, 2009, 1:39 pm)

Shame there’s no SVG logo file [:
59.

simran (April 30th, 2009, 10:25 am)

hello,

i need to know how to place my wallpaper in your account .
60.

mtrtmk (June 1st, 2009, 1:45 am)

The requirement of having a ’smashing magazine logo’ dissuades me from using calendar wallpapers as desktop wallpapers. Maybe the requirement could be reconsidered, or possibly the logo placed near edge of wallpaper so as to be unobtrusive. Thanks
61.

Fran (July 2nd, 2009, 4:55 am)

Cool… :D