LibreOffice Template Contest 2020

10. December 2020

LibreOffice Template Contest 2020

 

Adfinis organizes a template contest supported by the LibreOffice design team for some extra creativity, inspiration and fun in the last days of an otherwise crazy year!

LibreOffice is a project where everyone can participate – its open source development model and the embracing community are important factors in the ongoing success of the best known community-driven office suite.

As the Adfinis team is using LibreOffice for its daily work, we’re always happy to contribute something back to the project. Be it through our work in the Board of Directors, the investments in the iOS port or the hosting of infrastructure components for The Document Foundation, we’re helping where we can support this awesome project.

To end the 10 year anniversary, we reached out to our friends in the LibreOffice community to organize one more occasion to celebrate and give something back to the community. During the last few weeks of 2020, we’ll run a template contest and invite all of you to be creative, inspire others and bring back the fun into this crazy year! You can win nice prices and your work will eventually be used by millions of users in the future!

How it Works

The template contest starts on December 10th and ends on January 31st – one week before FOSDEM, where we’ll announce the winners.

We’re looking for high quality, shining templates, that make use of the LibreOffice styling and template functionality, which are practical in use and inspire users to create beautiful content!

Some Simple Rules for Your Work

Let’s keep it as simple as possible:

  • The template must be made available under the CC0 (CC0 1.0 Universal) license
  • The template must not include any non-free content
  • Any image or graphics that is used must be created on your own or be compatible with the CC0 license (if you’re not the creator of the image/graphic you must provide a proper source)
  • The template must not rely on any proprietary fonts
  • The template must be created in LibreOffice; a simple conversion from a template of another tool is not allowed

Some examples:

  • Don’t copy & paste from existing templates (also not parts) unless it’s a template that was done, by you or its license is compatible with CC0
  • Don’t use fonts like Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, etc. – those are proprietary fonts which are not available to every user
  • Don’t just use pictures that you found on the web – check their license and only use them, if they are compatible with CC0 (good sources are https://fosspost.org/open-source-images/)

Note: the jury may decide that some small changes to the submitted templates is needed before it’s possible to publish them, in which case the jury will contact the participant.

What You Can Win – And More About Participating

Participating in a community project is not only fun, but also very rewarding! While we can’t guarantee it, it’s possible that your work will be used by many of the LibreOffice users and of course we also have some nice prices you can win.

We built a jury of experts from the community who will analyze the submitted templates and judge them based on multiple factors. Some aspects the jury judge:

  • Creativity (mind-boggling images, fancy designs, nice colors etc.)
  • Usefulness (the more users benefit the better; the use of standards is a big advantage; provide content how to use the template)
  • Expertise (proper use of styles, consistency in color palettes, meaningful names etc.)

Prerequisites are:

  • Usage of CC0 licensed images (source needs to be shared)
  • Permission to use the template with CC0 license
  • Presence of contact address

The jury will choose up to six winning templates, preferably nicely divided over Writer, Calc and Impress, and award the six winning templates with CHF 500.- (€460.-, USD 556.-). We we raffle 15 hoodies, 10 t-shirts and 2 backpacks under all participants!

The jury wants award based on the various criteria listed for the contest. Of course, we hope to attract lots of good work to Make the work of the jury, choosing the real winners, Hard... But the jury of course also has the freedom to not award any prizes in one or more of the categories.

Get Inspiration

Before starting, it may be inspiring to have a look at what the other office suits offer in terms of templates. For example, Google:

Presentations

https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/?ftv=1

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13xEgT6dllKUG2T00Gq3nlTl_QhGF-8cnzy7xVbNyst8/edit

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CYim1UuyjQFzbXCILzz_AB3iHfV3jKX7Bo8wz72JE24/edit

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13c9szXU2hnXgZLuAPrXHXKeMDdODhdCFdPVRlRTrneI/edit

Text Documents

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/?ftv=1

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sXx3gx5ufMZ5FjHeS1fEs_enljhpu2f4O7u-LZL28Y/edit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/135MS4vyXE3uCkuBCJlexx3Z3Zh7xwWxVd-MdvFJkMbU/edit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mypf3XY1Owc1ZSWXvhUwTrquKa3ttPp-Gq-bEeqvv8w/edit

Spreadsheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/?ftv=1

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tjCSI4RLArfukz3IYCpZE8Ggs2odaEZ2jnl-qF6oYa8/edit

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g0xYI7Dvr6nFRMxxh0AiMGazK8FeXEePS-VQtA-hxcg/edit

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZHkT32sNaj3SZHJXHt1Dg8K0oF3rr–eNQNtLkcC8_g/edit

How to Submit Your Work

Before you submit your work, make sure you provide at least the following things:

  • Your template file, give it a describing name e.g. project_tracking
  • A text file containing your name + e-mail address, call this file contact.txt
  • A text file containing all sources of pictures, graphics, fonts, etc. your template uses, call this file sources.txt

Pack your work in a zip file or a tarball and name it using the following simple naming schema:

  • Your own chosen template title, for example project_tracking
  • Your last name, for example miller
  • The current date in the form YYYY-MM-DD, for example 2020-12-19 (December 19, 2020)

Put everything together, for example project_tracking-miller-2020-12-19.zip

You can submit your work multiple times, we’ll just check the latest version we get!

Upload your file(s) to https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/dbJZ8zRBH2oBpmR

The share is open until January 31. 2021! We’ll announce the winners during FOSDEM 2021 and later also in our blog.

Questions

If you have any questions, feel free to send them directly to template_contest@adfinis.com