With the KDE 4.8 releases drawing near, it's time to change the look of the default desktop. Every two major releases, the main wallpaper of the Plasma Workspaces changes to maintain a fresh style.

This time, artist and Oxygen Master Nuno Pinheiro (creator of most of the previous wallpapers) is asking the KDE community for a new wallpaper by starting a contest. Submissions will be accepted until December 4th. A jury of Nuno and KDE Community Working Group members Ingo "neverendingo" Malchow and Lydia "Nightrose" Pintscher will evaluate the proposals. Up to three submissions will be selected. The judges' favorite will be used as the default wallpaper.

A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE. Today we are happy to announce the winning designs. Read on for details of how to download the labels to use.

Vote for your favorite

As part of our efforts to better use our brands, we announced a set of labels for use by people creating KDE software. We chose three options: Powered by KDE, Built on the KDE Platform and Part of the KDE Family and asked for artwork for badges and banners carrying these labels. Now it's your turn to vote for your favorite - read on for details.

In March, we announced a set of labels for use by people creating KDE software, to demonstrate their association with KDE. We chose three options: Powered by KDE, Built on the KDE Platform and Part of the KDE Family and asked for artwork for badges and banners to illustrate these terms.

Every two weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team will be publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you're at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for the KDE 4 port of K3b which is currently underway. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the K3b Icons Survey now.

Two weeks ago, the third edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting was held in at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland. Sponsored by KDE e.V., Boudewijn Rempt, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi from the Krita project and Gilles Caullier from the Digikam project attended this yearly conference on free graphics software.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

The Oxygen team is happy to present the final selection of 15 wallpapers that will be released with KDE 4.0. It took longer than expected to manage the
contest due to the large number of entries (around 2000), but it was our first time organising such a contest. Read on for details of the winning entries.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.

The Oxygen team has announced a
wallpaper contest. Send in your wallpaper
and it might become part of the default set of wallpapers for KDE 4.0. The
Oxygen team is solliciting contributions from the community. The jury is
nobody less than Icon GodFather David Vignoni, The Mad
Scientist Nuno Pinheiro, The Loud American Ken Wimer and Oxygen Swiss Army Knife Riccardo Iaconelli.