Guidelines

We're made some minor changes to the front page and wanted to mention it in this post.

The upcoming month of April brings more excitement since we're going to be celebrating other spring regional festivals/events such as Tamil New year, Earth day, Sri Ramanavami, Easter, and such. We're showcased a few rangolis in these themes in the front page for your ease of use. The new comers should find those links handy for gathering new ideas. And our veterans can flip them through them for some happy/nostalgic memories. The category of pictures or photos as some of you know, have been showcased in the front page as well.

Some of our new-comers might benefit from the following guidelines. Regarding uploading rangolis, it would be helpful if you include tags while uploading your rangoli. Tags must be comma separated, and should contain most of the major design elements seen in your design (such as butterflies, mango, flowers, om, swastik, diya).
The tag "Freehand" is one work. Here is an example of the tag field from the upload form;

Freehand, ugadhi, ugadi 2014, mango, flowers

dotted kolam (if it is a dotted design)

Level: select "intermediate" for dotted kolams that have more than 8 rows of dots. Anything less could be in the "beginner" category.

Grid: must only contain the number of dots and should be left blank if the style of design in freehand.

Description: please write at least a single line about your rangoli, and do not leave it blank.

For new members, the rangolis are published within 2 or 3 days, if editing is required.
Please upload a maximum of two designs in a day. This strategy provides us all with a variety of designs on a single page, and motivates all to comment on all rangolis. In our experience, we've seen that if a member uploads five rangolis at a time, only one or two gets commented on (though members see it all, they may not be inclined to comment again and again for the same person at a stretch, which is understandable).

Please let us know if you've any other design-themes in your mind, that you would like ikolam to provide here or even work on in the near future. We love to hear your ideas and suggestions. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm and support!