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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.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the brand new Smashing Book?]

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:

1. choose any theme you like — typography, art, abstract, illustration, photography — it’s up to you, but the calendar should be in English,
2. 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).
3. 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),
4. 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,
5. download this form (.zip, with a plain text-file form.txt inside) and fill it in (it is a necessary step),
6. 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!
7. 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”,
8. 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!