When you think of GIMP, you think of Wilber; when you think of OpenSUSE, you picture the gecko; and when you think of Mozilla you picture 1990s t-rex clipart.
But when you think of LibreOffice? You probably just think of one of these icons:
These are nice, aren’t they? Clean and modern designs that adequately convey the form and function of each app in the suite.
But they’re not very personal. They’re not very exciting. And they say little at all about the values and ideals that LibreOffice as a project stands for.
LibreOffice Mascot Contest — With Prizes Up For Grabs
So, today, The Document Foundation Design team has launched a new competition to find a LibreOffice mascot — and you can take part.
Entrants simply need to design an original mascot (has to be your own creation, not something you found on Dribbble or Fiverr or anywhere else online) that tries to embody or convey the following concepts:
- Freedom/Openness
- Speed/Improvement
- Intelligence
- Cuteness/Seven Lives
The LibreOffice Design team says there are few restrictions about what form the mascot takes (i.e. it doesn’t have to be an animal, it could be a symbol or another glyph metaphor) but suggest looking to the LibreOffice branding guidelines for advice.
“The design should be available in two colors (to reduce printing costs, if necessary), and in full color”, they add.
Some seriously neat prizes are offered for the three top entries:
1st place: Slimbook KATANA (worth €729)
2nd place: Nextcloud box with Raspberry Pi 3
3rd place: Nitrokey Pro 3
Results will be whittled down by LibreOffice Board of Directors (BoD) and voted on by the community. But final, overall decision about which mascot is adopted (and which name it goes by) will be confirmed by the BoD.
Interested? You have until August 31, 2017 to add your entry (or entries, as there’s no limit) to this NextCloud instance or r via e-mail to contest [at] libreoffice.org.
One small tip: make sure your mascot’s file name is <date>_<author>_<name>.png, e.g. 20170628_joeysneddon_tofu-the-hamster.png, and licensed under the CC0 so that, y’know, the community can actually use it.
The biggest lure for me? Knowing that a LibreOffice mascot could end up as a playable character in open-source’s finest racing game SuperTuxKart…