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LibreOffice starts a mascot design contest!

LibreOffice is probably the most popular alternative to Microsoft Office, and comes preinstalled on many GNU/Linux distributions, however, it's also available for nearly every major free and non-free OS out there...And it seems that they are looking for a new Mascot!

In an article posted on June 28, The LibreOffice Design Team announced a contest that they have opened to the public, asking for people to submit designs for the new mascot. On top of the obvious reward of having your design potentially chosen, there are also three prizes available for potential submissions:

  • Slimbook KATANA Intel i5

  • Nextcloud box with Raspberry Pi 3

  • Nitrokey Pro 3

In the original article, the Design Team states that there are some metaphors that they believe might be suitable for LibreOffice and for the mascot, to give some ideas. However, they are also open to others.

LibreOffice Contest

"We have started by asking on the mailing lists some input about the concepts associated with LibreOffice.

  • Freedom/Openness

    • Dove like bird, through occupied by Apache OpenOffice (and disliked by some)

    • Hummingbird: Light, free, fast, with colors that remember also the LibreOffice colors

    • Dragonfly: is a beautiful animal with many colors which we can find all over the world, is a fast and agile flier with a robust body, and a symbol of courage, strength, and happiness (unfortunately, the dragonfly is used at DragonFly BSD and Opera Dragonfly)

  • Speed/Improvement

    • Fast birds, smart and not aggressive, hunter

    • Bird of prey (raptor)

    • Pegasus, Phoenix

    • a Gazelle

  • Intelligence

    • Owl: known for wisdom since the Greek goddess Athena, whose pet was an owl

    • Beaver (Castor canadensis): beavers are ingenious builders who can change the course of rivers, they are powerful patient doers despite their size, who can modify their living space in a few days

  • Cuteness / Seven lives

    • Louse/Virus: it irritates sometimes, but you can’t get rid of

    • Tardigrade (‘pudgy wudgie’): also known as water bears, they are adorable, and also perhaps the most indestructible creatures known to man

    • Rock-hopper penguin: it’s very cute with orangey-red-yellow tufts out of jet-black ears, they are impressively determined, despite the comedy-value of the way they waddle and bounce they achieve incredible feats of athleticism such as jumping higher than their own height from a standing start "

The Design Team went on to give a couple of methods in how you can submit your designs, "To share your proposal please use our Nextcloud instance https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/l58GED3Ngq92Rge with a clear identification of <date>_<author>_<name>.png (e.g. 20170629_htietze_grumpycat.png), or submit your artwork per E-mail to [email protected]. You can submit as many ideas as you want, but we may refuse input in case of very close designs."

So, to those of you with artistic talent, here is a rather exciting opportunity that you should jump on! The contest is open until August 31, so you have about a month to start designing and sending in your ideas.

For more information, please see the article posted by The LibreOffice Design Team and the best of luck to any of you who decide to take part in this exciting opportunity!

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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