Well...you have 2 choices.....either privately through email where the potential for peanut-gallery commentary is eliminated...or publicly here where you 'may' find comments to be neither helpful nor embarrassment-free...

I'd go with the former as the latter tends to end up as 'live with it' or 'it's crap but why was mine rejected too?' comments....

Jafo - ta for the comments, and I get what you mean.

If I asked for feedback here though, only the admins would have seen the submision to comment on it meaningfuly, and I could ignore any one else.

I'm also facinated by what makes something popular here, i.e. the 2 most downloaded submisions I've made to date have been by far the simplest to create.

Is there a corrolation between the clarity of what I wanted to create (and hence how easy it was to do) and how popular the result will be? If this is the case, then I'm only going to make things that take little time in future

No....it's not about speed or lack of....or about simplicity or complexity....it's about whether it can be expected to be reasonably popular as a wallpaper.

This section is NOT about 'Art', large or small 'A', but about what goes OK with skins, etc as part of the customizing environment.

Generally there is a whole swag of no-nos that are often submitted or included in a submission's creation....eg, the 'filter frenzy'....grab any old thing and apply as many plugin filters, etc until it looks like something else.....the most famous of these has its own name....'a blue swirlie'.

Then there's the 'affectation'....eg the lens flare......one of the 'wow this is neat' filters that is overused and abused, nearly always ruining the image....it's a cheap, childish 'wow' filter that mostly adds nothing to an image except the proof it was done in Photoshop...

Text in walls is not always handled well...and can be a distraction to the functionality of a wall....and one pet peeve is the image which appears 'cut off' or poorly 'framed'....like you are only getting part of the image and you feel robbed that the other bit might be better...

These are just general, but there are very many reasons that one image may be preferred over another....ranging from A to Z...

Jafo - Fair points, and criteria I'd expect to be applied.

However, as an example of what has confused me:

I created 2 wallpapers based on photos taken in London of the Palace of Westminster. One was accepted, the other not.

One was taken from the south bank, between the legs of a Dali-esque elephant using its legs to frame the famous clock tower with a sunset behind it all. The other includes just the skyline of the Palace of Westminster in silhouette. With both pictures I worked up and applied a purple-ish framing texture, with a white-ish boarder line (in differing styles).

With the better photo (IMHO) between the elephant's legs I added a very subtle "thin film of oil on water" texture (which I was very pleased to come up with) over the purple area and a slight smog appearance over the photo area and called the result "Toxic London", finally adding this text subtly in the bottom right corner. I was particularly pleased with this result as on the day I was there, I’d noticed the smog haze over London from the London Eye, and this wallpaper summed up this impression of London for me…oil on water, smog, but with surreal art and impressive architecture too.

With the weaker photo (IMHO) I applied a less aesthetically pleasing frame (IMHO), a simpler and less strong (in terms of the artistic merit IMHO) overlay, and didn't add any text.

"Toxic London", was rejected - and "Seat of Power" (submitted a couple of days later and before I knew the 1st had been rejected) was accepted....Since in many ways, the subject matter and the style was similar, do I conclude that the first one was rejected for having had some text added in the corner?

This theory would fit with most of the other rejections - one I called "Time leaves not a gentle mark" based on photos of pealing paint, rusty metals etc also had the title text subtly included...I suppose what I want to know is, if the text or something else is the problem, can I make slight changes to get these accepted?

I'm not entirely sure why I'd like to have the things I've made included here. I think the very fact that not everything is accepted and thus makes me strive to do better, is in itself rewarding.

The first 3 attempts I had to create wallpaper for here were rejected, and certainly should have been when I look at them now...they were very naive and show some of the Photoshop traps you mention – along with some other traps equally bad.

The very fact that some efforts are rejected makes me think "Right! I will make something good enough to be accepted!", so I’m not objecting to having work rejected – I'd just like to know why so that In can improve in an informed way, rather than blindly
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It's refreshing to see someone like you, Sput!

yes! good questioning of why something was rejected. It would be nice if you could have a link to the rejected wallpaper, or upload it as your desktop so we can see what you are talking about.

Hi Sput: As one of the moderators here, I too like your attitude towards acceptance of moderation on your uploads. We did used to send out moderation e-mails with all rejections, but you would not believe the abuse we used to get when people felt their work should have got onto the site, it was ridiculous sometimes. So, we stopped doing it. There are certain people who accept moderation well, and I have no hesitation in sending them an e-mail saying why it was rejected, as I know they will not send me a load of abuse by return mail. Because of your willingness to learn, in future if I have to moderate one of your submissions, I will gladly send you an e-mail explaining why.

I would prefer it if you didn't follow Travis's advice above, because then everyone will start uploading rejected work to their desktop, and pretty soon the messageboard will be full of threads titled "Can you believe they moderated this wall". That is the last thing we need, and I will remove threads of that nature if it becomes common practice.

I have said this in many threads like this, but, when I first started, I got moderated a lot too. I used to get mad, as we all think our images are the best, don't we?, but I tried to learn from it and just tried harder. Before long I was doing quite well, and didn't get moderated so much. And believe me, the guy that did the moderating back then (Shoggot) was pretty harsh, and pulled no punches in his rejection mails. I grudgingly have to admit that he made me a better artist, and if you take the advice of the moderators here (who are all pretty experienced people) and keep your good attitude, you will become better too. Who knows, someday you might be the one doing the moderation here. I never thought I would be, so you never know.

I hope this helps.

I do sooo... miss Shog

[deleted] aas per the mods request
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Thank you. If you would like to e-mail the image to me, I could maybe give you some feedback on why it was moderated. boxxi@ntlworld.com

Thanks for the feedback BoXXi. I'd actually gone off and done the upload idea in the mean time, so I've quickly deleted what I posted and tried to pull the upload. I can see exactly what you mean about what it would lead to!

How would you feel if I re-submitted the couple of works I'd like feedback on unmodified? I'm pretty sure of the reason for rejection for one, but I'd like to be sure...I didn't actually like it much myself, but I made it as I thought it echoed the style which seemed to be popular in terms of number of downloads so I'd be interested to know how it was thought I'd missed the mark.

I think it would be nice to get feedback on why a couple of my submissions have been accepted too actually Kidding - but I have been surprised on occation.

Ahhh...I'll e-mail it instead. Ta ever so.

OK BoXXi, I've mailed off the one discussed on this thread, and thanks again for the offer of taking the time to do this.

My pleasure. I will get back to you......

sorry, just curious.