That’s right, folks! The fabulous people behind Wordpress have officially blogged their intention to involve the online graphic design community in the development of the online blogging platform and CMS solution. According to one of the latest Wordpress development blog posts, this is primarily due to the overwhelming success of Project Icon, an icon design contest concluded in November of last year.

Because of that success, says the recent dev blog post,

We realized we needed to create more ways for graphic designers to contribute to the WordPress open source project. Our community is chock full of talent, and this talent is just itching to get involved. So, we’re trying out a few ideas.

Two primary avenues of contribution are already slotted for the graphic design community. The first is a call to get involved with quality control. Volunteer designers will be asked to take note of any missing, broken or otherwise malfunctioning graphical bits and report them, as well as review open tickets for small graphical updates (such as making a new Wordpress mark to coordinate with the new blue admin theme) and graphical fixes (such as a “Favorites” menu button to coordinate with the aforementioned new blue admin theme).

Tickets will be trackable, PSD files will be provided where necessary and interested designers are encouraged to also consider looking into the CSS-related issue tickets as the CSS and graphical issues may often overlap.

The second call is of a much larger scope and encourages designers who are more interested in “contributing to the evolving visual design of Wordpress”, says the blog entry. Whole portions of the Wordpress platform will be up for redesign, such as a new admin theme or new media upload process. For these tasks, which often involve a complete “screen” design, necessary resource materials will be provided, including specs for the design. Designers will be encouraged to submit comp designs, or mockups, for the project. And, if multiple submissions are received, votes from the community at large will be collected, helping to decide the final design decision or winning design comp.

At this time, Wordpress states they are not actively seeking participation of the latter sort from the design community, as Wordpress v2.8 is already nearly at an end, but it was stated that, once v2.9 development begins, “there will be more opportunities to get involved.”