[{: .alignnone .size-medium .wp-image-7331 }]({filename}/images/uploads/laidout-grafik-tools.png)
Tom Lechner
===============================================================================
Our
description of the first
encounter we had with Tom would probably be similar tothe one
ofany of the two
hundred people, sitting in the audience of the Libre Graphics Meeting in
Brussels, back in May 2010.
The Libre
Graphics Meeting is an annual meeting for users and developers of Free,
Libre and Open Source graphic design software.[Looking back
at the archive](http://youtu.be/zLKjdUGu02A), there is a proper
cheer when Tom progressively peeled, like an orange, the image he was
stretching over a dodecahedron, demoing the way Laidout could be used to
prepare the file to*print* such a
shape.
Tom has
as many facets as he has
obsessions for different mathematical geometrical schemes, after two and
a half years at Caltech where he spent a lot more time making artwork
than finishing homework, he"moved to
Portland to attendanart school and
then continued on to make artwork and open source computer art tools,
narrowly avoiding starving to death in abject misery under the weight of
student loans."
[Laidout](http://laidout.org/) started as an
imposition tool used by Tom Lechner to print his comics. Over time more
intricate functionalities were added such as the aforementioned
possibility to work
image imposition onto 3D objects, or
the addition of drawing tools. As Tom developed his own
GraphicalUserInterface
Toolkit for Laidout, the software
comes with a personal "voice".
It feels
like a very intimate tool full of hidden menus and shortcuts. With every
new version its exciting to see the added features and, how they all
come with their own approach and interface. Laidout appears to be like
any other tool at first glance, but when you take a closer look, or see
one of the screencasts on Youtube, you understand that Laidout has its
own approach —which is
really refreshing in a landscape where so many toolsare alike.
Engraving Fill Tool
The
most recent version of Laidout came with an engraving tool, a utility
that turns an image into line drawing. For the latest program of La
Balsamine, a Brussels theater for which we've been
designing the identity for some years now, the co-directors invited us
to work with engraving and engraving patterns.
We
decided to experimentondigital
patterns and lines, digging to
find different
ways to (re)draw images.Last year, at
the Leipzig edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, we were
treated to yet another
wonderful presentation
of Laidout's
new tool (called mesh
conceptions).
Wefantasized
over a similar
toolwhich
could"engrave" images with
the same fluidity and magic. A different approach exists in Inkscape
(arguably the
main vector editor
in the
libre graphics
world), but which
is more manual andmuch less
granular for what we wanted to
achieve.
Laidout
had, by then, most of the building blocks in place for what we wanted to
create. This season's program
forla Balsa was
the perfect opportunity to commission Tom
for this next step in the tool; applying the fill tool over an existing
image, a content aware overlay, of sorts.
[{: .alignnone .size-medium .wp-image-7331 }]({filename}/images/uploads/out-1_762-1327.gif)
It is this
relationship that we thought could be interesting to portray here; this
ecology
of exchange between
designer and developerwhich can only
really be affordedin a working model
where neither is afraid to open up their sources. This
relation is at the center of our practice, we couldn't really see any
other way of working now.
This
article was originally written as a response to a submission request to
[Grafik Magazine](https://www.grafik.net/) in the
[Screenshot](https://www.grafik.net/category/screenshot/) section. You
can view it in it's [intended context
here](https://www.grafik.net/category/screenshot/diy-software). the text
and embedded images are published under the [Free Art License
1.3](http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/) and
[CC](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)[-BY-SA](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).
