If the themes available on the Marketplace are disappointing for you, and there’s no decent pictures that make a good background, then this is your chance to get creative and make amends. Nokia are offering the chance of a designer to have their ideas actually created for the 360.

Platform Nation have teamed up with Disruptive Publishers who in turn have teamed up with Nokia to offer this exciting chance. The winning designer will net themselves a Blu-Ray DVD player (no HD-DVD player?!), a 42′ LCD 1080p TV, a 5.1 Digital Surround Sound Home Theater, a Nokia N81 Phone, five XBOX 360 Video Games (valued at $2499.99), and the winning theme will get published by DP, with the designer receiving a royalty contract from DP for some future content.

Anyone familiar with the themes will know that four unique backgrounds will need to be created and must be 1120×770 in PNG format. There’s also some handy hints to help you along the way:

• Create themes with sets of four unique, but complimentary images
• Use the color of the surrounding user interface “trim” (orange, blue, yellow or green) to compliment the theme design when possible
• Try to avoid overly complicated or “loud” theme designs which compete with the Xbox 360 user interface. A good theme should be complimentary to the overall console experience – not a distraction.
• Note that there is a significant “cropped” area from the 1120×770 source file and what’s actually displayed in most real-world situations on an actual HDTV setup. Namely, the blade trim and top/bottom “safe zones” will be cropped out, so please design accordingly.

Head on over to the site to sign up and enter your designs, then wait and pray that you get enough votes to win the competition. The competition is now up and running, and you’ll have until 12:00:01 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST) on the 14th April to submit. Voting closes at 12:00:01 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST) on the 28th April. Rather surprisingly, this contest is not only open to the 50 States of America but also the United Kingdom (and the District of Columbia and Canada).

Let us know if you plan to enter and show us what you’ve got!

Thanks to Steve519 for submitting.