osp blog - Harrisson

OSP in Designblast 2011

2011-11-16T17:19:00+01:00

OSP is invited to talk on friday at
Designblast'11 — Toys, Tricks & Tools — 18.11.2011
"Is it better to restrict yourself or to allow everything?"
Stand up talk by OSP Canal Historique. An open code to Love, Destiny, Fate, Passion, Rage, Pain, Fulfilment. With explicit pictures and language.

On 17/11/11, we'll do a day workshop on installing a non digital font. HFG Karlsruhe.

Developmental Cell Cover

2011-02-20T13:08:00+01:00

This is a uncommon job in uncommon conditions, as usual.

Maybe you heard about, but I 'm currently under a chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment for leukemia. I've been hospitalized for few month for marrow transplant. The treatment, though long, heavy and painful, is going well so far.

One of the luckiest thing I had during this adventure is the fact that marrow is compatible between my brother and I. The operation is therefore simplier than finding a donor.

My brother is a scientist, he leads a research lab in Strasbourg within the IGBMC - Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology. He was - of course - very excited by the adventure, and had to spend some times with me in the hospital. He and his crew were on the way to publish a paper on a specialized magazine named "Developmental Cell". Subject of the research they wrote about is the creation, shaping and development of a little spheric bone: the otolith (similar to the one we have in the ear.)

He was on the run and had to propose a cover. There is a competition between the most important articles in the magazine. I saw a chance to do the thing I love to do: graphics. Moreover, this would occupy time in the hight tech room where i'm locked and artificially maintained to life.

I did 18 proposals. 17 were handrawn, 1 done in Inkscape. The IGBMC crew met, voted and chose the inkscape one. They really liked the crispness of the spiro curves and the fluidity of movement they wanted to show in the article.

The cover was submitted to Cell, and happily chosen. It's the current issue, 15 Feb. 2011, Volume 20, Issue 2.

OSP is credited as such:

"On the cover: An artistic rendering of advections generated by cilia, which control the shape and growth of the developing zebrafish otolith. Harrisson generated this image with Inkscape open source software, using the vectorial curves algorithm Spiro. For more information, see Wu et al., pp. 271–278. Credit: Harrisson/Open Source Publishing."

As science text can't be closed, the full pdf is available here.
Mechanistic Basis of Otolith Formation during Teleost Inner Ear Development

This is how the cover was done. It was payed with an organ. I'm now a living example an open source body, as since the marrow transplant, I've changed blood sign and I'm generating my brothers. I got 2 dna in my same body. I'm a merge of different codes.

Funny, isn't it? Guess OSP impact factor is rising!

"Free as a Bone Marrow Transplant"

Archipel is under construction

2010-05-18T20:08:00+02:00

An organology of contemporary musics
"Archipel is a navigation on emotions and their history through sensorial zones."

La Mediatheque asked OSP for a full scale project: a new section called Archipel. It is an honour for us to collaborate with this gigantic library of media institution.
Archipel will be a serie of fictional islands where supports will be mixed and organised through sensitive keywords and subjective browsing.
OSP team has on charge graphics for its visualisation, identity, graphics, web consultation and on site installation.

The website deals with complex database and break through SVG interface, where Michael Murtaugh seems to get fun.
Furnitures are also part of the project, And Mathieux Gabiot leads this new design dimension of open source publishing - we're currently working on a GPL-based license for 3d objects.
After an draft installation at BPI during Cinema Du Reel 2010 festival in Beaubourg last month, public launch will occur this fall.

More to come soon!

The new Rosa B is out with some OSP action

2010-05-10T10:31:00+02:00

Rosa B, the web magazine, released in its new Vintage: the of Edit! colloque, which occured in Bordeau, France, in march 2009.
OSP was invited in this harvest and you can follow some Millesime traces of our passage there:

The parallel publishing workshop
The Michel Aphesbero, Francois Chastenet, Harrisson and Robin Kinross interview

www.rosab.net/format-standard/

0.47 in 47 sec

2009-09-16T15:08:00+02:00

Install Inkscape 0.47 pre release:
http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/06/download-inkscape-047-pre-release.html

Wow! This is mind blowing!

To get quadrichromical images from Inkscape, our "rock in the shoe" way is to save vectorial drawing in SVG, and import it in Scribus. To get the right colors, we recompose svg-rgb colors in scribus-cymk. It's a fastidious work, and limitative, but it works very well. PDF we printed this way are perfect. We feared that new release of inkscape would disturb this way of proceeding. But we couldn't believe our eyes when scribus perfectly imorted spiro curves and generated a ready-to-print PDF.

Yihaaa!

Friting in Brussels 20 09 2009

2009-09-14T10:59:00+02:00

Organised by a little open source minded people crew driven by fixed gear bikes, this Alley Cat Race will occur next sunday in Brussels.

Starts
20/09/09 — 14:00 (day without car)
Rue de la Victoire 96 — 1060 Bxl map
Distribution of spoke cards + checkpoint map

Ends
Place du Jeu de Balle — Aperitive, music, results etc.
Inscription: 3€

Trip:
+/- 35km, 9 checkpoints (incl. 3 task checkpoints)

Recommended:
Lights, Water, Helmet, Lock, Pen, Map of Bxl (19 communes)

Registration:
www.fixedgearbrussels.com

Flyer done in Inkscape 0.46!

Follow The Sound Festival

2009-09-08T12:18:00+02:00

OSP was commissionned to design the Follow The Sound festival image. FTS is a Free Jazz festival occuring in Antwerpen for 36 years.

We did a serie of 4 different posters and 2 flyers (one in Risograph, the other one in offset)
Typography and layout was done by OSP, and we asked RBDX to do colored background for each support.

Follow The Sound Fonts

2009-09-08T12:02:00+02:00

Band font for Follow The Sound festival were designed in collaboration with Jean Baptiste Parre from LPDME. It's remixes of the Avant Garde font, semi bold, in it's GPL version: URW Gothic, part of the Ghostscript urw-fonts-1.0.7pre44 package. Valek Filippov version with cyrillics can be downloaded here.

2 fonts were designed: Whisky Jazz and Distilled Spirit, both used in the project to give strange rythm. Please note the M letter which is a nice graffiti inspired trick. (We love it!).

Take them here: whiskyjazzbeta and distilledspirit

They're raw and unfinished, but correspond to a spontaneous enthousiasm.
It's beta versions, only the capitals were done. If anybody feels the pleasure of forging other letters, feel welcome!

Black lettrines comes from 19th century font samples.

This work is released under Free Art License.

Mamma Roma - La Sonic Party

2009-09-08T11:06:00+02:00

If you want to dance on the 26/09, here is the place!

Mamma Roma are 3 pizzerias in Brussels. Collerettecocofilllsd designed a logo, OSP adapted it for a flyer and poster. This caracter will be declined on the pizza delivery boxes. Done in Inkscape.

Pour la premiere fois dans ta ville

2009-06-07T16:03:00+02:00

Pierre Normal (pneu) and The Dreams en tournee.

16 June - Strasbourg, Le Troc Café, Rue du Faubourg de Saverne
17 June - Zürich, Kalki, Kalkbreitenstrasse (Palais Chalet)
18 June - Lausanne, Espace Autogéré
19 June - Stuttgart, Club für Flüssigkeiten & Schwingungen
20 June - Genève, L’Ecurie, (Palais Chalet)
21 June - Luzern, tbc
22 June - Genève, Duplex, 波(なみ) La Vague, rue des amis 7, 22h, (Palais Chalet)

Handmade xerox poster done by OSP (lettering) and ATKA (polpetto). Don't miss it if you're near!

And the winner is...

2009-06-04T17:08:00+02:00

Palais Chalet Maastricht

2009-05-18T20:47:00+02:00

Our camarades are back. This time in The Netherlands.

29 mai 2009
Palais Chalet

Live:
Pierre Normal
Bruno Cœurvert

Dj's
Hugo Sanchez
and the Palais Chalet Crew

B32 artspice,
Bourgognestraat 32,
6221 bz
Maastricht

And don't miss Atka 's superheroes in a collective exhibition
from may 8 to 31
C'est notre muse a tous.

Panik Party

2009-05-16T18:46:00+02:00

Among the 100 people involved in the creation and realisation of this poster, OSP.
2 of them are hidden in the picture (free poster for the one who spot them) and 3 other helped the setup...
This poster was done during the first year graphic design course at ERG, Brussels.
This course has been commissionned by Radio Panik to design the poster of their annual (and legendary) party.
Panik is a Brussels associative radio, one of the last of the real Free Radio. It is a fresh and colorfull wind in the grey landscape of commercial broadcast.

Everything on the poster is done by hand.
It can be cut in 49 different flyers, as the verso is printed with infos for the evening (line up, logos...). Once cut, the poster becomes a gigantic puzzle...
Back is done in Scribus, with handrawings processed in Gimp.

You can check some more pics here...
And listen to Panik there...

Hope to see you at this party that will be one of the hottest of the year!

The ecstasy of influence

2009-03-29T21:14:00+02:00

La Selec is a magazine edited by enthousiasts of La Mediatheque, a public service for renting records, movies, games and so on. Each issue La Selec invites a local artist to produce a poster inspired by their recommended selection of medias. This month it was Harrisson, so was consequently OSP. Here's the poster we did for this mythical institution.

Slogan comes from an Harpers magazine Jonathan Lethems article, which is really worth to read:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387

Poster was done with Inskape 0.46 and Scribus 1.3.3.12 on Ubuntu 8.10. Font is NotCourier Sans. Illustration inspired by the work of Czech painter Josef Lada (1887 - 1957), Jean de la Fontaine (1621 - 1695), and many many other influencing things...

LONG LIVE THE MEDIATHEQUE!

Poster Playlist:

MUSIQUES CLASSIQUES TITILLEES

FS3255 – Salvatore SCIARRINO Variazioni/Framento e adagio
XC800R – Carl CRAIG
& Moritz VON OSWALD Recomposed
XT240J – Jimi TENOR Recomposed
XA518L – ANGEL
+ Hildur GUNADOTTIR In Transmediale
XV398B – Esther VENROOY
+ Heleen VAN HAEGENBORGH Mock Interiors
XV184E – Jozef VAN WISSEM A priori
Xx ou Hx – Anne-James CHATON
+ Andy MOOR Le Journaliste
NC0897 - Arnaud CATHRINE
+ Florent MARCHET Frère animal
HB4746 – Charles PENNEQUIN
+ Jean-François PAUVROS Tué mon amour
XD139B – Myra DAVIES Cities and Girls
HB4850 – Denis PODALYDES Voix off
HA0049 – Fantaisie littéraire

CLASSIQUE

BA6296 – R. BALLARD, L'Astrée – Musiques d'après
A. BOËSSET… le roman d'Honoré d'Urfé
VA0413 – Eric ROHMER Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon
EC5680 – Béla BARTOK /
Dmitri CHOSTAKOWITCH
par Yossif IVANOV Concertos pour violon

CHANSONS FRANCOPHONES

NB1079 – BATLIK En mâchant bien
NL1506 – Loïc LANTOINE A l'attaque!
NL4414 – LIBEN Tout va disparaître

MUSIQUES DU MONDE

MH7075 – LENINE Labiata
MN8937 – YOM New King of Klezmer Clarinet
MP2242 – Erwan KERAVEC Urban Pipes

JAZZ / POST-JAZZ

UC2695 – Thomas CHAMPAGNE Charon's Boat
UM0267 – Rudresh MAHANTHAPPA Kinsmen
UE6442 – ErikM + AKOSH S. Zufall

RAP / HIP-HOP / GRIME / BLUES / etc…

KP9392 – PUPPETMASTAZ The Takeover
KF5141 – FOOD FOR ANIMALS Belly
KA6501 – ARABIAN PRINCE Innovative Life
KA3112 – AGNOSTIC MOUNTAIN
GOSPEL CHOIR Ten Thousand

POP / ROCK

XPxxxx – PATTON Héllénique chevaleresque récital
XA544X – ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Merriweather Post Pavilion
XG672A – GRAMPALL JOOKABOX Ropechain

FICTION

[4 cotes] – Jacques ROZIER [coffret 5 DVD]
VR0220 – Dominique ABEL
+ Fiona GORDON Rumba
VE0261 – Victor ERICE L'Esprit de la ruche
VB0737 – Victor ZVIAGUINTSEV Le Bannissement

DOCUMENTAIRES

TB4501 – Bruce WEBER Let's Get Lost
TB7645 – Steven SEBRING Patti Smith – Dream of Life
TW2751 – Jack HAZAN A Bigger Splash
TN2811 – Sandrine BONNAIRE Elle s'appelle Sabine

You can download the SVG file of the fox and crow here:

J/AZ

2009-03-22T17:06:00+01:00

The association "Jazz in Antwerpen" asked us to do the visual of their concert agenda.
We proposed this black and red Not-Courier logo.
In good jazz magazines this month :)

OSP full scale in Beaubourg

2009-03-18T19:31:00+01:00

As a side effect of the BPI/cinéma du réel festival, OSP has been asked to "perform" the program map in full scale in the Centre Georges Pompidou main hall, where the festival occurs.
The map is a derivative from the printed one, folded into the brochure.
It networks the festival selected movies and the subjective links between them.

FONTS

DIN
As the Centre Pompidou graphic chart is very restrictive, we had to use the DIN font. But impossible to use the FF DIN from fontshop, licensed. So we encoded the first cut of the open source DIN, from drawing of 1932 we get in Berlin in our previous adventures. Only capitals yet, but work is in progress.

ATLAS
For the printed map, we used a font Harrisson designed few years ago: the Atlas font, with country shapes instead of letters as glyphs. This font will be soon released with OFL license. We'll tell you the inner story of this font later.

MONTAGE

The re-drawing of our file "en dur" was a very strong and singular experience. We had the feeling of being into the file, and re-interpreting SVG code

It was like crossing the screen, and performing the choreography of the interface is a nice journey! The installation is the translation of the file into an object, the transformation of vectors into movements.

It is a new interpretation, a new version. It's the gap between the mouseclick and the gesture by editing on another support. We felt the distance and the similarities of the interface choreography and the gesture choreography.
A new articulation...

It becomes something human again.

FIX

Collaborators of this piece were convinced by the idea and came to help. Among them, FIX, a Paris renowned graffiti artist. Graffiti crosses our problematics in many fields.
First he tried to follow the original computer file to the maximum, but result was poor: all sensibility and spontaneity in the marking the piece was disappearing. Paradoxical situation for a tagger...
It was important that he could take the work for himself, and not being just an executant... So we simply redefined space of movement for him to translate the vectors with his feelings.

He could then confront his drawing and calligraphy experience to a new tool for him: 3M 471 model tape. And adapt his habits and talent. He found new ways to use it and we could all benefit from it.

The success of this job was to share a space of translation. And the interpretation gives a lively vibration to the general aspect of the installation.

It's an articulation.

With FLOSS, the resistance of the tool is now for us such a daily meal, that it has become a work field, an investigation space, and a playground.

OSP + BPI = Cinéma du réel

2009-03-18T17:49:00+01:00

Carte du réel

OSP has been sollicitated by documentary Cinéma du Réel festival to construct a map for an alternative reading of the movie selection.

Though book-like brochure is the most efficient and practical way to organise complex information of a 3 day with more than 100 documentaries, gathered in 7 different fields, this form seemed too restrictive for its director, Javier Paquer.

The linearity of pages goes against the idea that those movies have complex and multiple relations between them, and programmation is articulated in contexts wich need to be expressed in a way that audience could do their own choice as if they were travelling in a heteroclite thought meaningfull environment.

For that he asked OSP to graphically interprete this diversity and homogeneity...

Modus operandi

We worked in a very close relation, and the map is more done by its director than us.
General image is based on a famous image from Chris Marker's “La Jetée” movie.

The map reflects also a current situation of movies / documentaries / television / cinema situation. It offers a subjective interpretation mixing production and context.
A pleasure to realise, especially with it's director humor.

Moreover, spending 2 weeks on inkscape was a pleasure we didn't expected. Program is stable and pretty much reliable. If you don't go to far in the special features (types on curves, clones...) you're ready for print. And don't forget to vectorise ALL the fonts!

This deep breathe ino inkscape also shown the importance of a collaboration between users and developpers. It's funny to find stitches in interface, or counter intuitive logic when you're using the software.

For that, we'll have few suggestions for the inkscape board...

Most interesting features we used were around the clone functions. Drawing one pictogram, cloning it all around the map and modify this whole by just changing the mother clone is very effective.

Those special features are delicate to handle if you move out of Inkscape. This clone feature react strangelly when svg are imported in other programs.

The CYMK Elephant

Scribus is necessary to get files ready for printing. We imported the inkscape files as SVGs, and converted colors into CYMK manually. (Something should be done at that stage). PDFs looked good. Print culture is not that developped in FLOSS world, but it is very frustrating to see how archaic methods of conversions we had to invent just to get a basic quadrichromical document. This means last minutes corrections are compliquated, as everything is turned into paths and ungrouped.

The biggest threat was to obtain overprint of the black color. Drawing and lines are so thin that we couldn't dare to print in "réserve" (traduction needed)

To avoid it, we did 2 inkscape files: one with Cyan Magenta and Yellow, and separate one with Black. We imported those 2 files in scribus to convert RGB inkscape file to CYMK (manually). Parisian graphic designer “Dasein”, on charge of the brochure, gathered the films.

Check were stressy, due to the fact clones, groups, and “types on curves” reacted very lunatiquelly. Blurs and transparencies have to be avoided. It just don't work once exported, or with heavy and risky file treatment.

PDF is pleasantly light. 2.6 Mega for this impressive 440 x 550 mm document.

This map is integrated in the general programm brochure, and is re-interpreted in large scale in Centre Georges Pompidou, where the festival will occurs.

Palais Chalet 3

2009-03-11T09:39:00+01:00

le 13 mars Palais Chalet

griffes de velours -

avec

en concert :
Nora Düster de Zurich
The Dreams de Strasbourg

un live de :
Maison Concett de Milano

et aux platines : Athome, Atka, Caniche Noir, Diamant T.
cocktails au Sailor’s Trap Bar

début : 20h30 toujours aussi scherp !
Compilothèque, Quai des péniches 50, BXL

GRRRR - objectivity of the unperfect,

2009-02-24T10:35:00+01:00

During an internet wandering, and thanks to excellent K-SET website, I found the link to swiss drawing artist GRRRR website I was looking for a long time. Though I'm fan for a long time of his work, from Maika 2 (www.noraduester.net => music) record sleeve to Vitra 2006 catalogue, I hardly found traces of his activity. (GRRRR - 4 Rs - is not an easy keyword for google search! ).

Impressive urban landscapes, where structure, destruction and chaos are harmoniously gathered through organic black lines. Between meditative observation, and witnessing nervous and versatile urban activity, GRRRR works oscillate between ligne claire and expressionism, linking harmony and defaults...

Drawings also express a web cultural background infused with squats, human photocamera and alternative comics. Those images are the humble wanderer and patient retranscription of unspectacular scenes, half molded by human hands, half by traces of complexity of nature.

If drawings shows industrial objects, it is with the defaults of the human hand. If they show human construction, it is with long and patient observation and retranscription of its activity.

I was surprised to find digital version of his illustrations, where crude pixelated treatment to drawing emphases radicaly and harmoniously his drawing style. Moreover, animated movies and music videos testimonates of a serious activity, out of the boundaries of inked paper.

The GRRRR link page was also a good surprise. Among others, there are links to few open source applications we're used to play with, such as Gimp, Inkscape and so on... Curiosity convinced me to go over shyness, and contact him, though I'm not use to such intrusive behavior...

After an exchange of few emails, GRRRR kindly accepted to give a little interview.
Here it is.

= = = = = =

- May you introduce your work?

i do drawings:

i start my work with pen, paper and a nice spot for a little rest and to have a seat... then my goal is to fill the very last corner of that sheet of paper with observations my surroundings, these drawings later evolve into murals, picturebooks, animations and other media.

i started with comics which lead me into drawing on the street to have any backgrounds for the stories, this than turned into a large collection of "urban-landscape"-drawings from where i started a research in density/patterns/"bildrauschen" which will lead into...?
...and very soon after i self-published comics i began to put my work on the internet (see www.GRRRR.net), i really like the anarchistic, self-expressive and low-cost aspect of this worldwide network and update my website regularly.

- What is the background you're coming from?

i have been raised lowerclass by my single mother but in switzerland - quite a rich country, so im more like from the middleclass... and then came comics, squats, artschool, internet, extensive travelling, artmarket...

right now im high on books ;)...

How did you get into open source softwares?*

out of curiosity, because open-source belongs to everyone and the best things in life are free... :)

- Did the use of open source softwares changed the way you work?

Not directly, but its generally better to work with open structures, when i started publishing on the net i also thought about using (at that time still proprietary) flash-graphics, but vectors didn't fit my drawings, i much prefered the pixelated gifs and pngs, and the HTML-structure proofed to be much more extendable, cross-platform-friendly and able to stand the time...

i was about to learn linux but then mac went unix too and i got lazy ;)...
i work on mac os x, with programs like:
gimp
cyberduck
firefox
vlc
mpeg streamclip
scribus
neooffice
burn
pure data extended
gawker
copernikus
posterazor

- Why do you consider FLOSS softwares more appropriate to your practice than commercial ones?

1. free of charge, you pay what you want/can...
2. it is public property, i love public space in general...

- Is it a problem to use those softwares compared to print workflow or standards?

yes and no; as artist i try to do things differently, some disadvantages can turn out to be inputs for new ideas...
but till now i haven't found an opensource-program for my animation-work, so I still have to this with an old apple-software...

- Do you know other artists or designers working with FLOSS?

just a few, generally its only those creative people that come from the conceptual, the computer-programing side who are into linux and opensource... visual designers working on macs don't care, for example they're too lazy to install first x11 and then the gimp etc... though its really not that complicated: i just managed to install scribus with fink :) (though my first attempt, installing it
through macports failed...)

all you need is an internet-connection, a little time but most important: curiosity!

Rien a envier!

2009-02-19T17:47:00+01:00

Enfin! FLOSS+Art Book is Launched!
Damn it looks good!

Print is nice, typographic grid kicks, and "n'a rien a envier" to proprietary software book production.
The 26 libertinage fonts work very well combined with NotCourier.
Fidget letterines enhance.
Dynamic layout, good rythm from start to end.
Not boring visually for a text book.
We're very very proud!
Small step for printing, big step for open design!

Linux Limousine

2009-01-05T18:42:00+01:00

We're currently working on a poster for the support comittees for the nine people accused of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity". They were arrested the 11th of november 2008, in France, and 2 of them are still in jail.

They and others are the victims of a witch-hunt in which the word “terrorism” is applied to any ideas and practices which challenge the status quo. An international movement is emerging in their support.

For the poster, we re-mixed an open font, the Free Sans (think of Free Avec ;) as Pierre might say) from Free UCS Outline Fonts.

Even if the license is a bit unclear:

From FreeSans font:
Copyleft 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008 Free Software Foundation.

We did a version with A, R, a, and t glyph modified. The general aspect of the font completly changed. There's only the regular weight yet, but other may follow. Other versions as well...

Those "terrorists" were arrested in the Goutaillou Farm, in Tarnac, Corrèze. Corrèze is part of the Limousin region. This is why we called it Limousine.
It is also referred to the Limousine car, or limo, which may come from this etymology:

Le nom limousine viendrait du Limousin, la région de Limoges, dont les habitants portaient une vaste pélerine pour se protéger de la pluie, ou en référence à Charles Jeantaud, né à Limoges (1843-1906), l'inventeur de ce type de carrosserie appliquée aux premières voitures confortables. L'origine la plus probable est celle du véhicule hippomobile appelé limousine.

We hope they'll go free soon.

Site of the US support committee for the Tarnac 9
Site des comités de support

Palais Châlet

2009-01-02T16:18:00+01:00

16 Janvier
Liège, Belgium
Palais Châlet
spécial de soutien

- Révérberations Touchantes -
With

Live
Bruno Coeurvert
Pierre Normal

Dj's
JB from Paris, Athome, Atka, Le Caniche Noir, Le Diamant Tendre

20h, Rue chauve-souris 62, Liège, 2 euros.

Feel welcome to spend this lovely, romantic and supporting night. Where OSP crew meet, where they party, where they hear their favorite music, and where they they dance.

This party is a support to the 11nth of November arrested people.
"L’arrestation et l’inculpation le 11 novembre de neuf personnes, sous couvert de lois d’exception, terrorisantes, qui semblent n’avoir d’autre raison que de maintenir, par la violence, au pouvoir ceux qui les ont mis en place, nous concerne tous."

Link to the support comitees

The Fernand Baudin Prize 2008

2009-01-02T14:18:00+01:00

“The Fernand Baudin Prize” has been initiated by several graphic artists-teachers who work in the book world. The prize is supported by Brussels-Export. The principle aim of this initiative is to encourage the creation of the contemporary book in the Brussels-Capital region by honouring the most beautiful books. It is also intended to bring this creativity to the notice of a wide public and give it an international dimension through an exhibition and a catalogue which will be distributed abroad.

Belgium and particularly the Brussels-Capital region have undeniable roots in the tradition of the book. This know-how, which has been under-valued compared to that of its Dutch, Swiss or German neighbours (who, for a long time, have honoured their books), will now come to the fore on the international scene through the existence of a prize which will support its innovations and its creators.

Participants
The following may participate:
1) Graphic artists (workshops, design bureaux etc. are also admitted)
2) Publishers
3) Printers and/or book-binders
4) Artists

Rules and application form

OSP is part of this competition
(and has been commissionned to create the FBP logo ;) )

OSP wishes you a happy new year

2009-01-02T13:46:00+01:00

OSP in 75

2008-12-10T16:28:00+01:00

OSP is invited for a workshop day at 75 school, in Woluwe, Brussels.
Wednesday 17 December.
Music playlisting, video browsing, recipes printing, font remixing and pancake making.

The most useful book

2008-11-06T15:39:00+01:00

Nous sommes heureux de vous inviter à la présentation du livre collectif :

Vomit' can ich i'neun dî'neun?
en quoi puis-je vous etre utile?

qui accompagne l'exposition

Les 86 livres les plus utiles - pour nous
The 86 most useful books - for us

Vendredi 7 Novembre 2008
15:00
Patio - Abbaye de La Cambre
Bruxelles

Il y aura nous, le livre, l'exposition, un drink et plein plein de trucs.
On pourra y apprendre à peler un oeuf avec une fourchette, gagner 1000 euros avec une photographie, faire du feu, être invisible, rester éveillé sans café, et plein encore!

Tirage ultra limité prévu à 46 exemplaires, sans luxe ni détours, mais super beaux, et surtout bien utiles.

Vomit' can ich i'neun dî'neun?
est un livre réalisé collectivement
entre le 3 et le 7 Novembre 2008,
dans l'atelier de typographie de La Cambre,
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels,
dans le cadre du CASO Livre.

Starring

Espace Urbain:
Cecile Vandernoot
Larissa Vanhee

Sculpture:
Marion Fabien
Cyril Verde
Laure de Selys

Dessin:
Gabrielle Weissen
Szymon Dabrowski

Photo:
Maxime Brygo
Candice Cellier
Ludivine Sibelle

Typographie:
Aude Metz
Chloé Vargos
Pauline Gervasoni
Elise Borel
Mathilde Boucher
Kevin Cocquio

Design industriel:
Julien Beutter

L'assistant:
Harrisson

= = = = = = =

Logiciels utilisés pour la réalisation de cet ouvrage:

Ubuntu 7.10
- Xsane Image Scanner
- Gimp
- Open Office
- Gthumb

Mac OsX, OsX86
- Text Edit
- Photoshop CS3
- Indesign CS3

Appareil photos:
- Lumix X10
- Nikon D1X
- Canon G9
- Polaroid

Scanner:
Canon CanoScan 1240U

Papier:
Offset de photocopie de base 80g
Clairefontaine Trophée 80g
Fardes récupérées

Imprimante:
Canon LBP 810

Fontes:
Spectrum 1959
Not Courier Sans (http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/OSP/309)

Impression des couvertures sur une presse épreuve FAG Control 625

= = = = = = = =

Le Maurice:

Pour 1 litre de Maurice:
Faire mariner pendant 12h au frais, dans 1.5l de thé vert infusé 3mn:
1 verre de sucre brun
4 citrons pressés
1 botte de menthe
150g de gingembre coupé très fin.

Servir en base/sirop avec de la bière, de l'eau pétillante ou du vin blanc.

= = = = = = = =

FLOSS+Art book launch party

2008-10-19T21:18:00+02:00

The FLOSS+Art book (that we proudly were commissioned to design :) ) will be out this thursday at Mute Magazine HQ!
Book preview, panel discussion and software party!

Don't miss the opportunity to also check out the Libertinage font set we developed for this book: 26 variations of the Linux Libertine font! ~~Which will be available here and there soon~~... Available HERE!

Thursday 23 October / 18:30 - 20:30
Mute Magazine HQ
The Whitechapel Centre
85 Myrdle Street
London E1 1HL

Long live free edition and free fonts!

Le Sale Boulot with NotCourier

2008-10-14T09:19:00+02:00

Excellent Brussels based graphic design studio collerettecocofilllsd just released a book called "Le Sale Boulot", from ~~german~~ Franco-Chilean artist Vladimir Cruells. Main font used is NotCourier we designed. We're proud!

http://collerettecocofilllsd.com/blogblog/

Le Palais Châlet

2008-10-05T16:05:00+02:00

This flyer has been done by hand and by gimp with our beloved DJ Atka, to promote a new clubnight: Le Palais Chalet.

Palais Chalet first event will be this 24th of October, and is called La Corneille d'Or. Pierre Normal, from pneu record label and Dolina will play live. Atka, DJ Athome and Le Caniche Noir will put records.
It will be in Brussels, 20:00, at compilothèque, 50 quai des péniches, where we've done our previous print party. Don't hesitate to come, no doubts we'll hear there future OSP hymns, and sure we'll get inspired by boccocini and coktails.

New book cover approved

2008-08-21T19:16:00+02:00

We're currently finishing the layout of a new book: FLOSS+Art
Here is a preview of the cover, designed with Inkscape using the "clone tile" function. Font is Not-Courier Sans...

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

Topics include: digital art licensing,
copying and distributing under open content models,
the influence of FLOSS on digital art practices,
the use of free software to produce art and
the art of producing free software,
FLOSS as an embedded political message in digital art,
paradoxes and limitations of open licenses for digital art,
FLOSS as a way to quote and embed other artworks in
the making of new works, definitions and manifestos
for a free software art…

With contributions from:

Fabianne Balvedi
Florian Cramer
Sher Doruff
Nancy Mauro Flude
Olga Goriunova
Dave Griffiths
Ross Harley
Martin Howse
Shahee Ilyas
Ricardo Lafuente
Ivan Monroy Lopez
Thor Magnusson
Alex McLean
Rob Myers
Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez
Eleonora Oreggia
oRx-qX
Julien Ottavi
Michael van Schaik
Femke Snelting
Pedro Soler
Hans Christoph Steiner
Prodromos Tsiavos
Simon Yuill

Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk

This publication is made possible with support from:
- the Digital Research Unit at the University of Huddersfield
- Piet Zwart Institute, the Willem de Kooning Academy
- Constant
- OpenMute
- GOTO10

Help with design

2008-08-12T23:41:00+02:00

Bob Sutor, Vice President of Standards and Open Source at Industrial Business Machines, sees no alternative to Linux in the next 10 years. But there is a need of more graphic designers to help with design.
Link

Sapins-sapins by hand

2008-06-23T21:56:00+02:00

Petit-Fays is a charming small village in the quiet remote pine covered mountains of the belgian Ardennes.

Each year, there is the Ball of Petit-Fays village. During this week-end there are citizen diners, a big tent for feast and dance, an open air bar with cherry beer and barbecue, a nomadic friterie and a wild night long disco.

Some "Enfants du Pays", with strong musical professionnal amateurisme skills, hacked this traditionnal feast by adding smoothly a live music festival for 4 years. This Ptit Faystival opened the countryside community to share pop - rock - folk music with a friendly urban public during a mythical week-end.

This year we had the honor to be asked to do the poster. And we've done it entierelly by hand. We mixed spraycan/stencyls with silkscreen to get a forest of 200 singular pines.

Feel warmly welcome to join this partying forest! It will be this july 12, at 4pm, and for at least 24 hours...

= = = = = = = =
P'TIT FAYSTIVAL
= = = = = = = =

Dans le cadre charmant du village de Petit-Fays,

à partir de 16h, un festival de concerts
de musiciens
hors du commun
sous le chapiteau où commence à 22h,

le bal annuel du village
animé par DJ New Sensation.

Le camping gratuit est possible sur place.

Les sites des musiciens:

www.myspace.com/pekkokappi

http://lespotagersnatures.free.fr/contenu/participants/?g=27

www.myspace.com/twopindin

www.myspace.com/raypacinoensemble

www.myspace.com/djelephantpower

Itinéraire:

Autoroute Bruxelles-Luxembourg venant de Bruxelles
sortie 22 Beauraing, aller jusqu'à Beauraing
puis direction Bouillon (N95).
Après Bièvre, prendre à droite direction Petit-Fays.

Venant de Luxembourg, sortie 25, direction Reims-Bouillon N89 sur 20km.
Sortie à Menuchet-Dinant et prendre la N95 direction Dinant (10km).
Avant Bièvre prendre à gauche direction Petit Fays.

Gare SNCB: Graide

DIN 4

2008-03-31T22:50:00+02:00

Pandora's Standardised Box

Kommando OSP Pierre and Harrisson spent a few days this February in Berlin to explore the DIN project further.

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/index.php?level=album&id=10

The starting point was that we wanted to design an open format DIN font, based on the original documents stored in the DIN archives.

While encountering books, people, and wandering in our minds away from the DIN font core problematic of how to design such a font, more general (and richer) questions arose: the idea of implementing a "standard", public purpose fonts, and typographic design done by engineers.

This connects it to another thread going on in OSP: the question of standardised (European) language and its representation.

The DIN Archives

The DIN font is deeply interlaced in German history. It is actually one of its building stones. During this concentrated short stay in Berlin, we opened a lot of boxes, and copyright issues are uncertain...

We were told that there were only few remains of old DIN documents, before 1945, due to the fact that the building (located not far from Postdammer Platz, were fights were particularly intense) was bombed 2 times. Still, there was enough documentation for us to fill holes in the story.

Precious information was as well found in Albert-Jan Pool's essays published in ENCORE MAGAZINE (No. 13,14,15,17 and 18). It seems that the designer of the massively used "FF DIN", commissioned and distributed by FontShop, is currently documenting a research that will eventually lead to an extention of the FF family. This study left us with a lot of questions. For example, in 1949, the DDR started their own standard institute, written T (I don't understand?) and re-taking the DIN number after (I don't understand?), It seems there has been contact between the institutes. For that reason, an East German version of the DIN font was developed, but what are the rights for this?

DIN rights are not clear to us. We thought it was public domain, but it seems there is a misunderstanding on terms - even if this would logical for a standardisation to spread. We bought 2 sheets of DIN font specification, but we are not sure what we have the rights on with those sheets: the rights to use the font? Access to the know how? Those questions were raised after our RAID visit to the very interesting and wealthy DIN Museum, where everything is DIN, from staples (DIN 1) to coffee cups or... schnaps!

By the way, what used to be the DIN library, has been transformed into a Print On Demand workshop.

Engineer fonts

Encountering the question of standardisation of typography, we couldn't ignore the proposals of other countries in their efforts to homogenize systems such as highway signage or normalised national industry references.

This lead us to "National Fonts", and more specifically to signalisation fonts used across Europe. It is amazing to see that the field of road signalisation is often were typography and engineers meet:

We are looking for infos about Swiss and Belgian "Alphabet" 1 to 6 current highway signalisation font, apparently designed by the American 3M company, and imported in Europe via the Marshall Plan.
Seeing strong simultaneities between Bauhaus fonts [what fonts?] and the 3M version, we would like to know if there is any relation between them: is this font the result of engineer's mind or was it developed by an expatriated Bauhaus student working in the US?

We are looking forward for infos about a Polish roadsigns font, and this we might make the main subject of our next workshop we'll hopefully set in May, in Wroclaw, Silesia, Poland at the occasion of the "Libre Graphics Meeting 2008" .

Alexander Negrelli showed us a book by a letter painter from 1942 were all fonts, fraktur as well, are structured from a grid. Even the strangest fonts are qualified under a serial number (picture).

The destiny of east German fonts is related as well to this subject.

"Actually, in the strict sense of socialist thought and GDR tradition, the typefaces belong to the people and shouldn’t belong to any individual person."

Extract from interview of Karl-Heinz Lange, major font designer of VEB Typoart
http://pingmag.jp/2007/10/05/veb-typoart-the-east-german-type-betriebsstatte/

Fonts in the DDR were designed for a central company, apparently in Dresden - VEB Typoart. All the rights seems to be attributed to this Konglomerat. In 1989, after the Wall fell, those fonts were bought with the company, with the building... in a solid state investment. The companies were bought and re-bought until Mr X. got hold of it. Soon after the deal, Mr X had trouble with justice for fraud, and he flew away. No one knows now where the owner of the entire patrimony of former-DDR fonts is right now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Typoart

The Maxima font is currently owned by URW++.

Some of Berlins' public signage was digitalised by FontShop:
FF City Street Type

The thing is that it seems that there are 2 societies from the city doing signages, from the previous east and west part. Those 2 workshops are still in use, but not with exactly the same specifications, thanks to old systems of reproduction such as silkscreen.

To be continued!

Thanks to:

Raoul Sanders for the research-in-progress
Alexander Negrelli for helping us and sharing with us fleah market typographic treasures.
Arnaud Robin for his hospitality, music and coffe support.
Frederik Schikowski for his open ears.

The DIN Institute: Mr. Peter Anthony and the Permanent Exhibition Crew for their serviceability and kindness.

We hope to continue collaborating with all of them

OSP on the Radio

2008-03-27T18:51:00+01:00

OSP va parler dans le poste
ce mercredi 2 avril,
19:00 - 20:30,
sur radio Panik (il y a du stream), 105.4 fm a Bruxelles.
dans l'émission "le Libre en Questions"

Bonne écoute!

OSP parle à l'ERG, round 2

2008-03-18T10:58:00+01:00

Thanks to ERG and Marc Wathieu, OSP will perform friday 11th of April, during Open Course event.

http://www.multimedialab.be/blog/?p=1138

OSP Print Party
11/04
14:00 - 17:00
Erg (École de Recherche Graphique)
87, rue du page - 1050 Bruxelles.
Supposed to be open to the public.
In French, but multi-lingual pluggin installed.

Quadri in Krita

2008-03-11T14:40:00+01:00

"Why do you bother with complicated stuff to convert images in CYMK?" asked Loic Vanderstichelen the other night "Use Krita!"
And it works! It even manages 16 bits tif!
Now we know! ;)

OSP parle à l'ERG

2008-03-05T11:55:00+01:00

Répondant à l'invitation du cours de Typographie de Mme M.C. Lambert, OSP présentera des outils open source s'inscrivant dans la chaine graphique. Cette petite conférence abordera les problématiques de la typographie ouverte, ainsi qu'une présentation de nos recherches en fontes publiques, comme le DIN Project.

Cela se passera ce vendredi 7 mars 2008
à l'ERG, Ecole de Recherche Graphique.
rue du Page 87, 1050 Brussels, de 9:00 à 12:00
www.erg.be

Importing Inkscape in Fontforge

2007-10-20T11:03:00+02:00

Fontforge is an ideal font design program, as far we could test it out:
Opening mac fonts (on ppc here) is more direct, and drawing tools are really ok to take on. Soft seems more fluid than previous version and... it can easely import inkscape svgs!

Here is a way to make correspond inkscape size of document and fontforge size of font. This means you don't have to resize your imported svgs, they would pop up at the right place in FontForge when opened. Follow those steps:

By default, fontforge glyph dimension box is 1000 x 1000 postscript units.
The baseline line is set at 0pt.
ascenders goes up to 800pt
and descender down to 200pt.

In Inkscape, create a new document
In document properties, set all your units in inkscape in pixels (px).
Set the document dimension to 1000px x 1000px
Set an horizontal guide at 200px
Draw your letter.
Save it on svg.

Import it on fontforge, selecting SVG in the file import menu box.
Dimensions an placement should be the same as the ones in the Inkscape document.

Super!

Surprise package

2007-10-19T15:13:00+02:00

While preparing Werkplaats Typografie workshop, I had the good surprise to discover fontforge-executables in mac in an install package. This means installation of newer and better fontforge is now pretty much easier that it used to be. I've installed and worked on the ppc version of it. You still need X11, but we're used to it now. No?

"FontForge does not conform to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. FontForge never will. Don't expect it to look like a normal Mac Application. It doesn't."
Good, we love it!

OSP for VJ10

2007-10-17T16:01:00+02:00

OSP are currently working and testing hard for Verbindingen - Jonction 10 festival, organised by meta collaborators Constant. Offset CYMK Printout (5000 ex.) expected for next wednesday, with all the blurs, transparencies, gradients and fonts...

While trying to export the svg from inkscape to pdf, we encountered few problems with transparencies, and blur was completely ignored. We found a solution with using the batik SVG toolset from Apache.

Steps to reproduce:

Download the batik SVG toolset from http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/#download
Let's assume you unpacked the batik toolset in a folder: /home/you/batik
In the commandline, type: cd /home/you/batik/batik-1.7 (this may vary depending on the version of batik you have downloaded)
Let's assume you saved your svg file produced in inkscape here: /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.svg
In the commandline, type: java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar -m application/pdf /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.svg
This produces the file /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.pdf with correct transparency and perfectly rendered blurs!

Multiplication of liberation

2007-09-17T22:11:00+02:00

OSP is testing Liberation Mono in an invitation for an exhibition in Brussels:

(Inkscape, Gimp and Scribus)

Liberation

2007-09-17T21:59:00+02:00

Thanks to Red Hat®, a 3 major new sets of fonts under GPL+exception license.
Named "Liberation" serif, sans and mono, those types are designed to subset the hegemony of proprietary helvetica, times and monospace courier new because metric compatible. It means distance between letters are the same, lenght of documents won't change if helvetica is substituted by liberation sans font.

"Using these fonts does not subject your documents to the GPL--it liberates them from any proprietary claim"

Well cutted and with a very nice overall ambiance, the sans cut is particularly interesting, and much much nicer than another substitute for helvetica: the Arial. It is clearly affiliated to the Akzident Grotesk, but looks more neutral in the use. The serif cut is very far from the Times, and got formal similarities with the Vera Serif. But it gives a good contemporary, simple and elegant aspect to long readable texts, as far we tested it.

The wikipedia article

rpm font files and true type font files:
https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

Odessa 12" released!

2007-09-17T21:27:00+02:00

No it's not a new software, it's a record OSP contributed to, using inkscape and gimp... Proud to announce another printed matter on a great maxi.

0704 - DOXA- ODESSA

“DONNA”
THREE HIGHLY AMAZING TRACKS. A VOCAL TECHNO TRACK WITH ODESSAS BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND TWO OTHER HOT AND SMASHING TECHNO PRODUCTIONS. THE EXTENDED SIDE IS REALLY WORTH LISTENING TO!
(quote from Kompakt website)

http://www.myspace.com/odessatechno

DIN - Das Ist Norm - III

2007-06-25T14:38:00+02:00

Schablonenschrift A - Din1451 - August 1949
Inkscape drawing.

Tea for Tiles

2007-06-06T19:19:00+02:00

Good way to practice softwares is getting jobs done for friends. This week, Maluka, an excellent, enthusiasming and courageous organic shop (placed at the corner of our office street, which helps!), asked us to design them a logo and cards. Here is the proposal, using Vera Sans Serif and Inkscape, and specifically its magic "clone tile tool".

As works are also a good way to share knowledge, it is the good context to show a specificity of the clone tile tool that Cédric Gemy showed me in Montreal, after LGM Inkscape presentation.

Clone tile tool allows to duplicate an element on a specific area of the page, using parameters such as shift, symetry, scale, rotation, blur, transparency... and trace

Example: vecto-pixelization (very handy for vinyl cuttings)
1 Open an image (such as jpg) in inkscape. (image can also be another element drew in inkscape, such as type!)
2 Draw what will be the "pixel" (here, a star).
3 Place this on the upper left corner of the image.

3 In the clone tile tool box, go to tab "trace"
4 Select the caracteristic you want to be transcribed (here it is the lightness of the jpg)

5 Select your motif and "create"

This feature needs a bit of test and practice, but it's worth playing with. Ressources are almost infinite.
There are plenty of random settings you can set (as I did for Manuka)...

And... fasten your seat belt, here are few bonus tricks!

Le grec, c'est du chinois

2007-05-25T14:56:00+02:00

Conversation avec Pierre-Luc Auclair (Déjàvu) et Nicolas Spalinger (OFL)

SIL_deja_vu.mp3 (27 mn - 25 Mb)

Extrait d'une conversation avec Pierre Luc Auclair, graphiste et collaborateur dans le projet de police Déjà vu, et Nicolas Spalinger, bénévole de la SIL, équipe fontes libres Debian et Ubuntu, OFLB.
En français dans le texte, avec quelques questions posées en anglais.
Ou l'on parle de polices de caractère libres, de travail typographique collaboratif, d'apprentissage et de licences & standarts.

Liens:
Déjà vu, SIL, OFL, Gentium font, Andika font, Typophile

Interview: Projet Dejavu et typographie libre et collaborative

P-L: Pierre-Luc Auclair (Typographe Dejavu, Graphiste)
N: Nicolas Spalinger (Bénévole de la SIL – Equipe fontes libres Debian & Ubuntu – Open Font Library)
H: Harrisson
F: Femke

H: Tu travailles sur la fonte Déjavu (http://dejavu.sf.net) c'est ça?

P-L: Oui c'est ça

H: Qui est un projet entièrement open source?

P-L: Oui, c'est ça.

H: Et ça fait déjà un moment que cette fonte existe, non?

P-L: Ca fait... Je ne pourrais pas dire depuis combien de temps exactement, ce qui est sûr c'est qu'avant c'était une fonte de Bitstream (http://www.bitstream.com) qui est sortie ou plutôt qu'ils ont donné au domaine du libre. Et depuis ce temps-là, des gens ont ajouté des fonctionnalités, des choses comme ça-là, plusieurs caractères, des nouveaux languages, ajusté le kerning (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning), dans le fond ajouté des éléments à la police au complet pour la rendre utilisable.

H: OK donc rajouter des éléments?

P-L: Oui.

H: Chez Bitstream, quelle a été la motivation de lâcher des fontes?

P-L: Alors ça je ne sais pas.

Nicolas: Ca été un partenariat avec la fondation GNOME (http://foundation.gnome.org, http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/bitstreamfonts.html) si je peux m'immiscer dans la conversation.

H: Oui, oui, c'est bien.

P-L: Moi je ne suis pas au courant de ça.

N: Il y a des négociations qui ont été faites entre la fondation GNOME et Bitstream le fondeur, avec des gens comme Jim Gettys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys) qui était membre du bureau de la fondation. L'idée c'est d'avoir une famille globale avec suffisamment de...

P-L: ...suffisamment de caractères pour supporter toutes les langues dans Linux avec une seule famille...

N: oui, avoir une famille suffisamment vaste, complète.

H: En faire une fonte système?

N: Enfin oui, système au sens où ça serait la fonte par défaut. Et donc ça a pris des mois quand même pour faire la négociation, entre les termes que la fonderie voulait et ce que la fondation GNOME essayait d'arracher comme droits, de modification notamment. Et donc moi j'ai suivi ça un petit peu. Parce que en même temps nous, dans le cadre de la SIL (http://scripts.sil.org), on réfléchissait aussi à la meilleure stratégie pour faire ça. L'idée c'était d'avoir quelque chose d'assez riche, de bonne qualité, avec du hinting - des instructions - qui soit dédié à un affichage correct sur le bureau.

H: Vous avez eu le choix entre différentes fontes ou bien c'est Bitstream qui vous a proposé juste celle-là?

N: Alors je sais pas vraiment, j'étais pas directement impliqué dans le cadre de la fondation GNOME, j'ai rejoint le projet après.

P-L: Ah oui, il connaît plus ça que moi.

N: Ha ha, non!

N: Je sais qu'ils ont approché d'autres fonderies, mais c'est Bitstream qui a offert ce qui était le plus intéressant.

H: Ah oui, donc il a eu une négociation?

N: Oui il y a eu une négociation qui a eu lieu. Donc il y a vraiment de la part du fondeur une stratégie... lls veulent s'acheter une bonne image, ce qui est légitime et ils veulent aussi protéger quelque part leur nom. Le coeur de la négociation c'était avoir des droits de modification, pour que les gens de la communauté, les typographes de la communauté puisse la modifier, l'étendre, mais que la réputation de Bitstream en tant que fonderie soit plus ou moins protégée. Donc il y a un espèce de point central, de « nexus », qui a été créé entre le droit de modification et le nom même attaché à la police, voilà.

H: Et quand on voit la license, c'est en effet toujours un copyright Bitstream avec droit de modification (http://www.gnome.org/fonts/)

N: Voilà, c'est un droit de modification, donc quand la modification a lieu, le faut que le nom soit changé, et dans le nom même de la police il y a le nom de la fonderie, ce qui est assez fréquent malgré tout. Donc le nom c'était Bitstream Vera et ensuite il y a les variantes. Il y a eu une grosse « press release » puisque c'est un gros pas en avant. Et donc ensuite, il y a toute une équipe qui s'est mis à travailler sur ça, il y a eu plusieurs branches de Vera et, au bout d'un certain temps, la branche la plus importante – Dejavu - a re-mergé les travaux qui ont été faits dans les autres branches. Sur le site de Dejavu il y a l'historique un petit peu des autres branches qui ont été faites (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Bitstream_Vera_derivatives). Il y a eu une branche par exemple pour les caractères en Gallois, et pour d'autres pays en d'Europe par exemple. Aussi du travail autour des capacités OpenType (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType)...

P-L: oui des capacités Opentype...

N: ...pour les polices intelligentes, ce genre de chose, etc. Ce qui était impressionnant, moi, j'ai observé un peu le projet Dejavu, j'ai pas vraiment contribué, mais c'est la rapidité avec laquelle le projet a avancé.

P-L: et dans le fond, c'est probablement aussi parce qu'il y a une release tous les mois.

N: Oui c'est basé sur un rythme de release actif, tout ce qui est prêt est disponible. Il y a aussi une roadmap bien définie, les outils sont là: outil de révision de contrôle, mailing-list, wiki. L'initiateur du projet c'était Stepan Roh (http://www.srnet.cz/~stepan/en/), et ensuite d'autres personnes.

P-L: Je pourrais pas vraiment donner de noms.

N: Au bout d'un moment il a un peu lâché le projet et a fait d'autres choses mais il a mis en place l'infrastructure, mais là, depuis quelques temps, il est revenu. Et les leaders actuels du projet c'est Denis Jacquerye (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Denis_Jacquerye) et Ben Laenen (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ben_Laenen), je crois, mais il y a plein de monde, plein d'autres gens, la liste des contributeurs est assez vaste. Ben Laenen a d'ailleurs sorti une police musicale, c'est celle qu'on à montré hier. (Euterpe: http://www.openfontlibrary.org)

P-L: Ben moi je les connais avec leurs nicks IRC: lui c'est eimai.

N: Oui eimai et moyogo.

H: Elle est assez bien dessinée en plus, elle est assez jolie.

N: Ce qu'ils ont fait aussi c'est travailler sur un certain nombre de scripts de gestion des fichiers sources. Donc l'outil de base, c'est fontforge (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net), donc je ne pense pas qu'il y en ait qui utilisent des logiciels restreints, normalement tout le monde utilise fontforge.

P-L: Oui toute la source doit rester au format fontforge.

N: Pour faire la construction.

P-L: Quand il a y des modifications pour faire l'import dans la branche principale ça prend absolument le fichier source fontforge pour l'insérer dedans.

N: Il y a aussi du travail aussi sur les instructions, tout ce qui est du positionnement, les ligatures, ils sont assez en avance par rapport aux autres projects collaboratifs. Moi j'ai vu aussi qu'il y avait des scripts pour avoir les statistiques de la couverture Unicode (ttp://www.unicode.org) du SFD (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/sfdformat.html) par exemple.

P-L: Ca aussi c'est sur le wiki

N: A chaque fois qu'il y a une release, dans le tarball il y a ce quiest couvert par bloc, donc il y a un pourcentage de couverture Unicode par bloc et on voit que ça monte vite, il y a ce qui est prévu par la suite, il y a un changelog. C'est assez riche au niveau descriptif et c'est très ouvert comme approche. Et donc l'utilisation de subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) comme dépôt de sources pour travailler en commun dessus. Donc il y a un canal IRC (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat) et plusieurs mailing-lists (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Dejavu-fonts_mailing_list).

P-L: Récemment il y avait quelqu'un qui essayait de refaire le script Grec, je ne sais pas vraiment ce que ça a donné, je ne me suis pas tenu au courant.

N: Alors ça j'ai pas suivi non plus.

P-L: Il avait beaucoup posté son travail sur Typophile, le site web (http://typophile.com/).

N: C'est un site web communitaire, vous connaissez peut-être oui?

P-L: Là-bas il y a beaucoup de gens, beaucoup de professionnels de la typographie, qui leur ont donné des exemples, des experts en typographie qui ont donné leur avis sur comment le projet avançait pour le script Grec. Il ont donné des conseils. Il y a eu un gros débat: est-ce qu'on va plus vers une esthétique du style romain ou alors est-ce qu'on va plus vraiment vers une esthétique grecque locale? Ca c'est toujours un problème, c'est la même chose aussi j'imagine pour les scripts chinois et les scripts japonais.

N: Connaître le degré de sensibilité culturelle pour un bloc particulier Unicode de la police, ça c'est très très dur. Même les meilleurs designers ne peuvent pas avoir une sensibilité suffisante. Plus la police est riche, plus elle couvre de blocs, plus c'est dur justement. Parce qu'il y aura forcément des tensions. Certains blocs sont communs à différents styles. C'est là où ça devient dur d'avoir dans la même police et mettons du cyrillique qui doit avoir un style pour une communauté linguistique qui parle une une langue dans laquelle il y une transcription cyrillique et les Russes qui préfèrent ça comme ça. C'est là où ça devient complexe pour une famille aussi riche comme Dejavu. Ce qui a été fait récemment, c'est une décision qui a été prise, c'est d'avoir une sous-famille Dejavu qui s'appelle LGC, pour Latin Grec Cyrillique pour éviter d'avoir tous les styles ensemble.

H: C'est d'enlever le latin des autres blocs.

N: Puisqu'ils sont quand même assez proches. Il y a du travail qui a été fait au niveau des blocs Arabe et Hébreu.

P-L: il y avait des problèmes avec la baseline qui était pas la même.

N: Il y a des problèmes techniques et aussi des problèmes d'expression de styles. L'avantage vraiment de Dejavu c'est que ça pousse le reste de la « pile » logicielle autour des polices de caractères. Il y a certains mainteneurs comme ceux de Pango (http://www.pango.org) ou de Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/products/firefox/) qui se disent, « Woouah les typographes de Dejavu exposent encore nos bugs, ahh ».

P-L: Ca arrive assez assez fréquemment. Ha ha ha.

N: Ca prouve qu'il y a une activité assez formidable.

P-L: C'est vrai mais pour revenir aux locales (locl), j'avais beaucoup de difficultés à me mettre dans la peau d'un typographe designer en Grec, un typographe designer en Cyrillique, pour moi personnellement je ne le lis pas, c'est du Chinois, je sais pas du tout ce que c'est. Pour moi, c'est plus une icône qu'un caractère de texte.

N: C'est ça la difficulté en fait. Beaucoup de designers dans la SIL (http://scripts.sil.org/TypeDesign) doivent s'entourer de gens qui connaissent le script pour faire quelques chose de culturellement approprié.

P-L: Parce que si on n'est pas natif dans le script, c'est difficile de dire : est-ce que ça c'est une bonne légibilité dans le script ou est-ce que c'est vraiment merdique.

N: C'est sûr.

H: Est-ce que vous avez des collaborateurs justement Arabes, Chinois ou Japonais, des gens qui sont vraiment dans leur langue?

P-L: Des collaborateurs réguliers ou juste simplement des observateurs?

H: Les deux je dirais...

P-L: Probablement plus des observateurs.

N: Des gens qui rapportent des bugs sur la liste en disant «oh là! il faut pas que ça soit comme ça !»?

P-L: Mais des typographes japonais chinois, je pense pas.

N: Des gens qui envoient des patchs?

H: Des gens qui dessinent carrément des caractères et autres?

N: Sur le site de Dejavu c'est indiqué plus ou moins leur status, si leur travail a été repris via un merge ou s'il sont vraiment actifs. C'est aussi ce qu'on essaie d'encourager dans le cadre de la logique de l'Open Font licence (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL) avec le FONTLOG (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web#00e3bd04), cet espèce de changelog dédié à la typographie et au design de polices, c'est vraiment de décrire les modifications parce que la plupart des polices propriétaires qu'on a, il y a pas de descriptions, c'est une release finale et voilà.

P-L: Tandis que dans Dejavu c'est un travail constant, mais ça crée aussi des problèmes, si quelqu'un crée un texte avec la police, si tu changes la taille des caractères, si tu changes l'espace entre les lettres, ça va nécessairement tout changer. Donc est-ce qu'on fait un changement pour le mieux dans un certain caractère ou on le garde pour garder le support antérieur?

N: Ca c'est la décision du changement. Ce que je voulais dire, c'est le fait que les changements soient décris très précisément c'est une bonne chose, parce que souvent dans les fontes propriétaires, on ne sait pas ce qui se passe. Voilà, c'est la nouvelle version si ça marche vous êtes content mais si ça marche pas venez nous voir, et donc le changelog est vraiment précis: c'est à dire que telle ou telle personne a ajouté tel bloc ou a fait ce changement-là.

F: (I will ask my questions in English otherwise it takes too long, And you speak French). This way of working is quite different than the way than historically typographers have worked. There seems to be a history of say a lonely man working on their internal piece, and the way you describe the process of designing Dejavu is completely opposite. So, how do you think this is visible or legible in the typeface itself or in the practise of doing typeface design?

N: Il y a un fait fondamental, je pense, c'est la vitesse à laquelle les modifications sont faites. Mais je sais qu'en discutant avec Victor Gaultney (http://www.sil.org/~gaultney), il y a des expérimentations qui ont été faites, en tous cas dans les écoles de dessin de polices, de typographies parfois ils mettent comme ça des étudiants ensemble en disant « travaillez sur une police et ce soir vous nous montrerez ce que vous avez fait ensemble ». Mais le fait d'utiliser ça de manière distribuée via un gestionnaire de révision de contrôle, un canal IRC ou une mailing-list c'est quelque chose qui se fait que depuis quelques mois, quelques années, avec Dejavu et puis d'autres projets que la SIL lance (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_fonts). Mais c'est vrai qu'initialement c'est quand même un art personnel, élitiste.

P-L: Mais quand même, j'ai lu assez souvent que les typographes, il y a en plusieurs qui ne sont pas vraiment excellents pour faire l'espace entre les lettres, mais ils sont très bons pour faire le lettrage. Certains vont faire le lettrage, un autre va aider à faire l'espacement entre les lettres. Donc c'est souvent un travail collaboratif mais peut-être pas au même niveau que dans Dejavu.

N: Pas commun, c'est-à-dire, je fais mon truc, je te le passe et tu fais ton truc.

H: C'est pas une fragmentation des tâches?

P-L: C'est plus une ligne de montage que de la collaboration.

N: D'accord, je vois.

F: I'm also curious, because many type designers if you hear them speak about their typefaces, they link it - consciously or subconsciously to handwriting - to expression of let's say the style of a person, in a way, like the way something is drawn, which is a very individual expression, and then if you think about the way you work on a typeface, you completly blow that up in a way. Or not?

N: Je pense qu'on retrouverait les styles communs des différents contributeurs quand même, c'est un peu la transparence d'un système de gestion de sources, on peut rajouter quelque chose mais les autres peuvent aussi le modifier aussi donc il faut qu'il se crée une certaine culture des modifications. C'est pour ça qu'il y a ce concept de roadmap, je ne pense pas qu'on perde vraiment la partie style.

F: Non, ce n'est pas perdre, ce qui m'intéresse c'est le changement dans la pratique de faire une lettre, de faire une courbe ensemble.

P-L: Mais il y a quand même le style du caractère qui s'impose aussi quand tu fais ce que tu fais, tu peux pas dire moi je fais le caractère, un script d'une certaine façon, dans le fonds c'est un peu comme ce qu'on a vu dans le documentaire Helvetica (http://www.helveticafilm.com/) hier soir. Il y en avait un qui disait qu'il y avait une espèce de systèmisation du caractère, donc les courbes et toute les parties du lettrage vont avoir une connotation dans une autre lettre. Parce que sinon si tu ne fais pas ça comme ça évidemment, ça va avoir l'air dépareillé.

...

N: Ca serait intéressant de voir un fichier README d'une police libre comme Gentium (http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium), pour voir quels sont les conseils qui sont donnés à ceux qui veulent envoyer des patchs, en terme de formats, en terme de style, en terme de recherche, etc. Le designer quand même reste maître, même si c'est toujours un projet ouvert, il reste maître de la légitimité d'un patch.

F: Maître?

H: Et vous avez des formations de typographie ou de graphisme?

N: Non, pas vraiment, mais ça m'intéresse.

P-L: Je suis designer graphique moi-même, mais j'ai pas eu de formation académique, mais c'est sûr que je lis beaucoup, probablement plus que la majorité des étudiants de design. Dans le fond, c'est sûr que j'aimerais avoir une éducation en tant que telle mais en travaillant on en apprend aussi.

N: C'est quand même beaucoup de choses à apprendre...

P-L: Mais c'est dur d'apprendre seul et de s'établir soi-même un plan d'apprentissage, d'avoir d'autres personnes qui apprennent avec toi, il faut que tu trouves tout toi-même.

P-L: Mais dans un plan communautaire c'est plus facile d'évoluer.

N: C'est pour ça qu'on a comme projet avec Dave Crossland (http://understandingdesign.co.uk/) et d'autres de rendre public les compétences par rapport à la typographie, ce qui était enseigné dans quelques écoles très très prestigieuses par une poignée de gurus, il faudrait que ça soit disponible plus largement.

H: Est-ce qu'il y a une entraide comme ça entre les designers sur les techniques de dessin, sur la manière de procéder? Graphique, je dirais, spécialement graphique?

P-L: C'est sûr qu'actuellement tout le monde à sa façon de faire, son procédé, si vous allez sur Typophile, les gens sont très ouvert pour aider les débutants qui commencent en design typographique, si vous avez des questions sur n'importe quoi, eux ils sont là pour vous aider. Il y a des professionnels qui travaillent chez Adobe, qui ont travaillé sur la spécification OpenType eux-mêmes et qui peuvent vous dire exactement ce dont vous avez besoin.

N: Il faut juste savoir poser sa question de la bonne façon.

H: En respectant leur hiérarchie?

N: Non, non un peu de diplomatie, c'est normal.

P-L: Le domaine typographique est encore beaucoup dans l'espèce de mentalité apprenti/maître, donc c'est souvent l'apprenti qui essaye de se mettre au niveau du maître.

F: For me, as I look at open source projects, and the different ways collaboration is organised, I find this again, this contrast with this stark hierarchy of master and...

P-L: Mais je crois pas que ça soit une hiérarchie explicite, mais plutôt une hiérarchie implicite, souvent celui qui contribue le plus c'est aussi celui lui qui connaît le plus donc c'est lui qui va aider le plus.

N: C'est la méritocratie quelque part, c'est aussi un plaisir pour celui qui connaît les choses de les partager. Mais c'est vrai qu'il y aura toujours ceux qui sont très bons, qui connaissent bien leur domaine et qui ont beaucoup d'expérience et ceux qui commencent juste. Mais il y a un échange. Il y a un plaisir d'échanger les compétences et les connaissances.

H: Et si tu es dans une tradition humaniste, d'effacement de prétention graphique pour un intérêt commun...

N: Pour moi personnellement il y a un but: qu'il y ait plus de systèmes d'écriture qui soient disponibles, que la qualité soit là, que les barrières qui empêchent certaines personnes d'accéder à l'écrit et à ce que l'écrit peut donner comme indépendance, comme autodétermination, etc, que ces barrières puissent s'effondrer. Il y a des recherches qui ont été faites en terme de lisibilité, par rapport à ceux qui apprennent à lire et à écrire par exemple. Plus la fonte est agréable à lire, plus les gens ont envie d'apprendre à lire. Notamment dans les contextes ou c'est des adultes qui apprennent à lire quand il y a des campagnes d'alphabétisation par exemple dans les pays en voie de développement. Il y a vraiment une recherche, si on fait ça avec telle fonte, les résultat seront vraiment médiocres mais si on fait ça avec une autre fonte, il y aura un intérêt, il y aura une passion, il y aura beaucoup plus de gens qui réussiront l'examen d'alphabétisation. Un des projets de la SIL c'est une police dédiée justement à l'alphabétisation, qui s'appelle « Andika » (http://scripts.sil.org/Andika) c'est du Swahili et ça veut dire « écrire ». Il y a une vrai dissociation qui est faite entre certains caractères qui sont peut-être trop proches les uns des autres surtout quand on commence à lire et à écrire il faut qu'il y ait le moins d'ambiguïté possible. C'est un design original mais c'est vraiment une fonte avec une richesse suffisante pour que ça soit disponible dans des langues qui utilisent des scripts complexes, certaines langues africaines aussi où il y a ce type de glyphe. Donc les designers attendent des spécialistes en alphabétisation d'avoir des retours pour améliorer encore le tir. C'est aussi une fonte qui a des variantes, comme ce qui commence à être fait aussi je crois dans Dejavu pour avoir des variantes en fonction du contexte. Parce qu'il y a des gens qui préfèrent un certain type de « a » avec un certain style, etc.

P-L: Donc c'est des « alterns »

N: Double story a, single-story a. Les ligatures, la manière dont les chiffres sont affichés là. Vraiment dans un but d'alphabétisation initiale mais comme c'est un design original il y a beaucoup de gens qui commencent à l'utiliser aussi pour du design comme ça.

H: Comme fonte de travail?

N: Oui, c'est une Sans Serif (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif) qui est un peu le pendant de Gentium, parce c'est fait par les mêmes designers. Il y a eu moins d'efforts par rapport aux inscructions pour l'écran. C'est plus directement pour l'impression mais bon si les linguistes peuvent trouver ça agréable aussi quand ils travaillent sur l'écran, c'est mieux. Mais ça prend plus d'énergie pour les instructions etc. Et puisque que c'est libre les gens peuvent y contributer s'il en ont besoin.

Je sais que certains leader de Déjavu réfléchissent aussi à la légitimité de passer à l'Open Font licence, mais ça ne s'est pas encore fait parce que en amont, Vera est encore sous ce copyright-là. Mais en fait on est en train de négocier, en tous cas il y a une réflexion qui se fait avec Bitstream et GNOME, pour qu'un nouvelle version de Vera sur laquelle ils ont travaillé sorte sour license OFL. Ensuite, comme Dejavu est un dérivé, les développeurs, les designers se rassembleront et voteront pour voir s'ils passent à l'OFL ou pas, parce que actuellement en terme de license il y a Vera et les dérivés de Vera sont licence Vera plus domaine public ou plus quelque chose d'autre. C'est pas vraiment défini quel est le statut des dérivés. Il y a vraiment une richesse sur laquelle on peut bâtir, mais on ne sait pas trop selon quelles règles. c'est un peu le flou. Donc l'idée de l'OFL c'est de clarifier la manière dont les dérivés fonctionnent. Le designer original de Vera s'appelle Jim Lyles (http://www.myfonts.com/person/lyles/jim/), on est en contact avec lui.

F: C'est donc c'est lui qui va décider?

N: Oui lui et sa boîte et ses directeurs. D'ailleurs dans la documentation qui est livrée avec chaque nouvelle release, chaque nouvelle sortie de Dejavu, on voit dans les statistiques de progression ce qui est original, ce qui a été fait par le designer de Bitstream et ce que les nouveaux designers ont ajouté. Donc on voit la progression.

H: Donc il y a un archivage à chaque fois?

N: Oui c'est vraiment décrit. Il y a peu de projets sont aussi décrits.

[...]

Là voilà le changelog, donc chronologiquement inversé. On voit, la première version qui a été donnée dans le cadre du travail à Reading, à l'Université de Reading, voilà quelques bugs qui sont réglés. C'est aussi la logique de dire « voilà les problèmes qui ont été réglés. Il existe des problèmes. » C'est pas comme beaucoup de logiciels propriétaires qui disent « il y a jamais eu de problèmes. Mais si vous achetez la version suivante il y aura plein de nouvelles fonctionnalités » et on vous dit pas tout ce qui a été corrigé. Et là, la source aussi qui est mise avec, ce qui est aussi important pour les polices libres. La définition d'une source pour une police c'est quelque chose d'assez vaste, ça peut être la base de donnée des glyphes, ça peut être les comportements contextuels, OpenType ou Graphite (http://graphite.sil.org), ça peut être les instructions, ça peut être un guide pour le design, c'est-à-dire voilà les choix qui ont été faits, ça peut être de la documentation des scripts pour la construction, pour les statistiques, etc. Voilà aussi « Fix some duplicates» etc. Voilà: « Anyone can create their own modified version ».

F: « using a different name »...

N: L'idée c'est de permettre le branchage: il y a le tronc commun, plein plein de branches peuvent pousser à partir de ce tronc-là, mais il ne faut pas que les branches se prennent pour le tronc. C'est possible qu'une branche puisse avoir plus de fonctionnalité que le tronc mais il ne faut pas que les choses se mélangent. Que les gens qui choisissent des fontes puissent bien identifier d'où ça vient. D'où l'intérêt aussi du changelog, c'est tout dans la description et dans la transparence.

F: Mais il y a déjà des branches?

N: Oui oui, il y a déjà plusieurs branches. Il y a des gens qui ont travaillé sur une version Hébreu, il y a des gens qui ont travaillé sur des langues du Népal je crois, des langues Indiennes aussi, en partant du design de Gentium.

F: So the original design remains but then other language sets are developped. Did you see say design versions, for example people that have adjusted all glyphs or decided to make it like Harrison did a Courrier or Sans-serif, a kind of style changes? C'est possible de faire ça?

N: Oui, c'est tout-à-fait possible, ça serait un changement plus complet, c'est-à-dire qu'on pourrait prendre quelque chose d'existant et repartir plus ou moins de zéro.

P-L: Tant qu'à y être, c'est aussi bien de redémarrer à partir de zéro mais avec une autre idée de ce qu'on peut faire avec cette police.

N: Si le style est vraiment différent c'est plus vraiment un dérivé. L'idée c'est aussi de pouvoir aussi peut-être réutiliser les scripts de statistiques et de construction, les choses qui font partie de cette source de fonte qui peuvent aussi être re-utilisées. Voilà les conseils qui sont donnés aux contributeurs, c'est dit que les branches peuvent exister et que le mainteneur original va continuer à travailler sur le tronc, « develop the canonical version », c'est un peu ça. « We warmly welcome contributions » voilà les conseils qui sont donnés, en terme de format, pour envoyer un patch, en terme de source, voilà qu'est-ce qui est recommandé. Pour les attributions aussi, ça c'est quelque chose qui va plus dans le coeur du mécanisme de license, on a le droit d'ajouter son copyright aux modifications que l'on fait. On hérite le copyright du tronc initial, on peut rajouter le bout qui couvre sa contribution personnelle, bien sûr on n'enlève pas le copyright ancien, mais si on veut reverser quelque chose au tronc ça se fait selon les règles de celui qui maintient le tronc. Dans le cas de Gentium, par exemple, le choix a été fait de remettre le copyright au nom de l'ONG en question. Bon les gens décident au coup par coup. Et donc voilà quand c'est dit là, c'est comme le fichier plans du projet Dejavu, quels sont les trucs sur lesquels on a déjà plus ou moins travaillé, si c'est déjà prêt c'est pas vraiment utile que vous y consacriez du temps puisque c'est déjà fait on va peut-être utiliser ce qu'on a déjà. Mais voilà ce sur quoi on n'a pas encore travaillé, voilà si ça vous intéresse, travaillez dessus, posez-nous vos questions, et on l'intégrera peut-être.

Ici on parle du travail sur le Cyrillique par exemple, un petit avertissement aussi: le format peut changer, le mécanisme de construction peut aussi changer. Il y a aussi la partie Acknowlegements, une espèce de liste qui peut grandir et qui est structurée. Savoir qui a fait quoi, qui a contribué et où et d'avoir les détails. C'est dans la même logique de ce qu'on disait hier dans la présentation pour les métadonnées, c'est utile pour un designer d'exposer ses données, de laisser un peu sa trace quoi. Ce qu'on veut faire c'est que pour les utilisateurs finaux on puisse aller facilement sur le site du designer, sur le site de son organisation peut-être, et de voir ce qu'il a fait dans ce cadre-là. Le fait d'apparaître c'est une bonne chose pour le designer, dans la logique de ne pas garder les choses secrètes et sous scellé, le fait de faire les choses en transparence c'est aussi bénéfique, c'est de la bonne pub, la construction d'une bonne réputation.

Transcrit par Nicolas Spalinger avec quelques corrections mineures pour clarifier les phrases et ajout des URLs pour un meilleur contexte et une meilleure compréhension du mouvement des fontes libres.
Merci à Harrisson et Femke pour leur intérêt pour la typographie libre et collaborative et leur travail de couverture du Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 à Montréal.
Cette transcription est © 2007 Nicolas Spalinger et placée sous licence CC-BY-SA.

Further Liberation.

2007-05-15T10:35:00+02:00

If we check the font infos of Liberation font, on Fontforge, for example, here is what we find:

Copyright Ascender Corp...
and a trademark: "Liberation is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and certain other jurisdictions.". In the license text of the ttf font package, we find: "Copyright ¬© 2007 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. LIBERATION is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc.", and the license text is GPL.
Still, the license informations says:
"Use of this Liberation font software is subject to the license agreement under which you accepted the Liberation font software."

Interesting as well: Liberation Sans seems to have been created in 1970, while all the others in the pack were in 2004 or 2005.

Liberated fonts are not exempt of paradoxes...

Looking forward, the owner of rights of this font are Ascender Corporation, "leading provider of advanced font products specializing in type design, font development and licensing" company, which offers services such as Font Branding.
you can also contact their "Font Licensing Specialists"

Sure designer Steve Matteson knows exactly the font system specs - and what he does: "...in 1990 he began work at Monotype to create the Windows core TrueType fonts: Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New". He designed a.o. Xbox 360 Branding Fonts and is part of the Segoe Vista font team development.

By the way, there is no Comic-Sans-like font in the L-pack. Which designer will have the honour of drawing it?

Libre Graphics Meeting

2007-05-09T07:33:00+02:00

Montreal, 4-6 May 2007

An intense meeting of demos and how-to’s – LGM takes place in three fairly intimate rooms in the Ecole Polytechnique of the University of Montreal, which means we have enough time and opportunity to ask our questions, set up interviews, discuss bread baking with developers, designers, typographers, researchers gathered.

The university is located on the slopes of the Mont Royal so between presentations we spot skunks and squirls in the park.

It is both inspiring and strangely intimidating to meet the makers of many familiar tools: The Scribus team is present in full force, key developers of Blender, Gimp and Inkscape are around and speak about their tools with infectiuous enthusiasm. We need to make a bit of an effort to make people understand that our interest goes beyond feature requests and bug reports. Collective charm needed to convince George Williams, developer of FontForge, to do an interview with us. “I have nothing interesting to say” he keeps telling us during the Grand Supper. Well, he finally agreed to an interview so judge for your selves.

Friday 4 May we land in LGM with a talk by Bryce Harrington + team, presenting a history of Inkscape in screen shots (slides), and an overview of ways FLOSS projects are usually structured. Inkscape is according to Bryce Harrington based on a 'hive' model; a relatively unstructured coming and going of high energy collective work. Bryce ends with presenting the upcoming release of Inkscape 0.46. New features will amongst others include: gradient in typography / etching effect / print dialogue. He also brings up Inkbook – decentralized, networked drawing in .svg; interesting stuff.

Jakob Steiner demos Inkscapes' ability to produce photo realistic illustrations, such as Motorola phones and shiny racing cars thanks to blur, transparency and mask functions.

Of the more strange but fascinating kind: Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov reverse engineer the Corel Draw image format. Their hallucinating travels through endless bin-hex dumps show, that also for them, structure reveals itself through transformation. Igor presents CDR-Explorer, a tool to visualize binary formats for reverse engineering purposes. The Explorer allows you to look at a raw file as if you look at a folder structure, which facilitates the understanding of its various building blocks.

Peter Linell starts his talk on Scribus with telling about his first encounter with developer/initiator Franz Schmidt. He portrays Scribus as a program built around robust + safe pdf-export. Linell goes in to various new features, amongst which the ability to import layered Photoshop images, and ways to process images inside Scribus – duotone etc. can now be edited from inside the software. Apart from the ability to add bleed and registration marks, he presents The Color Wheel, including the ability to pre-visualise a document as seen by someone with various flavors of colorblindness (this feature deserves its own post!). Andreas Vox follows with the new lay-out system (NLS), in Scribus, explaining the transition from old, convoluted code via a 'legacy mode' in to the New Lay-out System. Character styles, word spacing and optical alignment are amongst new additions. In the near future we can expect paragraph optimisation for hyphenation too.

The evening is reserved for the Grand Souper LGM with live music and convivial atmosphere in the very orange patio of the Ecole Polytechnique.

The OSP presentation is planned early morning on Saturday May 5. We speak about the relation between tools and what they produce; about creativity and efficiency, using the tale of the frog that turned into a prince (text and images follow!). The small audience that is present in the lecture room early enough, seems pleased though slightly surprised by our unorthodox approach.

In one of the classrooms reserved for LGM, Karin Delvare (The Gimp) tours through different layers of participation in FLOSS projects and explains amongst others the art of doing a bug report. In the main hall, Hubert Figuiere speaks about how to organise images using metadata; his presentation is concluded with a discussion about various media/supports for archiving.

Michael Terry from the University of Waterloo is involved in developing InGimp. This software automatically archives userdata / behavior for the purpose of usability studies. Interesting was that the system makes log files automatically publicly available (leaving out any data that might breach privacy), allowing developers to analyse incredible amounts of ultra precise data on for example the amount of time spent on certain tasks, patterns of access, combinations and successions of tasks. As a gadget / feature the team developed a 'dynamic profile visualisation' – basically a stick figure with representations of assumed tasks, of ways of working.

Back in the classroom, Cedric Gémy (~~responsible~~ contributor to Inkscape and Gimp documentation) demonstrates with élan the possibilities of using free standards and open source software, moving from Inkskape to Blender to Gimp to Scribus; Boudewijn Rempt and Cyrille Berger show new functionalities of Krita, a simple image editor with the ability to do for example realistically behaving watercolour images (colours actually blend!) and dry brushtrokes.

For the presentation of Alexandre Robin: Our first year of Graphic Design 100% Open Source, see this OSP post.

Dave Crossland (designer, lecturer) and Nicolas Spalinger (SIL) speak about the Open Font License, and the way metadata on fonts could reflect these licenses. They spend the second part of their presentation showing Spiro which caused great enthusiasm in the audience.

In a lively Q +A session, Peter Linnell demonstrates the robustness of Scribus in a prepress context, explaining the set-up of PDF export and how 'self-defensive-code' is employed to please even the most conservative printshop requirements. To his mind often faulty fonts are the cause of output problems – Scribus therefore is ultra careful with loaded fonts; it is the reason why a first start-up is slow; each font is checked glyph by glyph before it is added to the list.

The day ends with a crisp presentation of Raphael Meltz, Le Tigre, a French monthly magazine entirely layed-out in Scribus. Raphael shows Le Tigres' work flow of both their monthly print and daily pdf-publication; including a rudimentar end-to-end solution between SPIP (a web based Content Management System) and Scribus. Raphael was clear about their economical and philosophical motivations for using FLOSS, without being shy about the possible problems and difficulties, which had most of all to do with html import-export issues.

At the end of the day we interview Nicolas Spalinger and Pierre-Luc Auclair (contributor to the Deja-Vu font project). The evening FLOSS font enthusiasts gather in Concordia University to watch Helvetica, a full length documentary on the modernist typeface premiering in Montreal.

Sunday May 6 starts gently with a private tutorial on Inkscape and Scribus by Cedric Gémy; we talk lay-out with Raphael Mertz.

The second presentation this weekend by Igor Novikov is even more exciting, demonstrating SK1, a vector illustration programme, specifically for prepress. SK1 offers solutions for many problems with CMYK export we find in other programs. Their user interface is refreshingly different and their set of sample images fantastic. Discussing the history of the program (a fork of Skencil), shows that the Ukraine context requires its own approach. That is more or less the subject of the interview we do later with Igor and Valek.

Andy Fitzsimon impresses with his virtuosity in Inkscape (glassy icons galore!) but most of all with his intelligent approach to the management of translatable design elements across multiple languages. Making use of .svg, he manages to employ the .po format (used in many translation projects) to translate styled typography. We are also interested in his use of the xml-editor as design tool.

Jon Phillips presents The Open Clipart Project, and most of all ccHost, a sort of repository system where images, sounds and other files licensed under Creative Commons can be made available for download; making direct connections from applications such as Inkscape to ccHost ('save to ccHost'). George Williams (FontForge) was interested to add the possibility to direct upload fonts from FontForge too.

After the conference is officially over, a BOF is (Birds Of Feathers: developers gathering) organised on type management and its future.

About 10 developers involved in projects relevant to typography, gather around the table for an intense session on standards, the workings of fontconfig ... Exciting to witness how everyone seems to come up with real proposals that will undoubtly alter the future of using fonts on linux systems.

We spend Monday morning interviewing Andreas Vox about Scribus and Igor and Valek about SK1 and Ukrainian software culture; soon here on OSP.

Smooth curves drawing font revolution?

2007-05-07T00:40:00+02:00

Spiro is a toolkit for curve design, especially font design, created by Raph Levien. It is a smooth alternative to the wide known Bézier curves... It is VERY impressive using.

Dave Crossland and Nicolas Spalinger (OFL – Fontly) demoed a chain of process: a script that takes a scanned sample of fonts, contrast it, then recognises and chops automaticaly the glyphs, and import them as background for Spiro PPEDIT application. You can then use the spiro to draw the outlines, in an easier and smoother way than beziers (and reducing the amount of points). Automatisation of the work process is a terrible gain of time, and made me dream the whole night. The spiros curves are accepted by Fontforge, and tranformed as editable beziers curves... On linux systems, files produced by ppedit are immediately send to the famous font editor...

levien.com/spiro

A MacOs version has just been released: enjoy the incredible souplesse of the curves manipulation. The tensions angles seems to be very automatised - and are difficult to stress, but I hardly tryed it... You can't save the curves done... yet. Some more info will be released this week!

1 année de Graphisme, 100% libre

2007-05-06T23:40:00+02:00

La conférence d'Alexandre Robin a LGM

Association internationnale en science politique.
Design Graphique, administration reseau, dévelopement web, Alexandre à choisi de travailler en OS plus par goût que par économie.

Une présentation enthousiasmante, menée dans un protocole tout "corporate" il apparait aussi que le sujet était: "comment j'ai caché à mes collègues que je faisais toute la communication de la l'entreprise en Open Source".
Alexandre a fait son "coming out" (open source) le mois dernier, et la philosophie Linux est presque comprise par son boss.

Out of the veil

2007-04-28T11:05:00+02:00

250 cm2 of printed matters OSP visit card have been delivered.
They look bright! The file delivered to the printer was a PDF from inkscape.
It seems that the SVG suffered of a RGB to CYMK conversion which altered a bit the colors. All colors were based on 100% of magenta and/or cyan and/or yellow and/or black. And it's not not interesting.

Soundscape goes Inkscape

2007-04-27T14:22:00+02:00

The new maxi vynil from Odessa is about to be send to production. We worked on the label design yesterday and inkscape's "clone generator" feature did the difference. It was the perfect tool to render an electronic disco ball - and type, evoking the minimal dance pop of the music and the complexity of the sound production and composition. Hopefully soon to be heard at your local dance club!

From a small but growing movement

2006-10-27T15:40:00+02:00

Due to my recent task of teaching typography, I was looking around for courses and experiences in that domain. This drove me to Ellen Lupton's website, teacher at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA): www.designwritingresearch.org. There, in an impressive generosity, you can consult her current syllabi and exercices of hight quality courses.

She's is also a responsive designers awared of the problematic of proprietary fonts in design. Her website host a free font manifesto page: http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html

Lupton wrote several books on teaching typography. The manual "thinking with type" is a reference in the field. This book is accompanied by a rich teaching website: thinkingwithtype.com which gives number of exercices and "adaptative" syllabus.

She's editor in Freefontmanifesto Blog

Print Party Berlin

2006-09-18T09:33:00+02:00

A report from the whole day is here: http://www.stormy-weather.be/wiki/in...

For Wizard of OS Constant Printing Team members Harrisson and Pierre Huyghebaert showed that designing and printing booklets with Open Source software is nowhere near Science Fiction.

Wednesday the 13th of September, Pierre and Harrisson presented a Print Party during Wisard of Os 4. This event was taking place in Berlin. The critical panel, organised by Cornelia Solfrank and Nicolas Malevé at Tesla (former Podewil) gathered Laurence Rassel, Simon Yuill, Harrisson, Pierre Huyghebaert, Simon Worthington, Adam Hyde, Saul Albert, Gisle Froysland, Malte Steiner, Gordon Duggan, Eberhard Ortland, Hinrich Sachs, Aileen Derieg, Goran Djordevic, Gergers Petersen, Felix Stalder, Inke Arns, Jacob Lillemose, Annette Schindler, Dorothea Carl, Christian von Borries, …

This compact presentation was focused on the imposition of a 8 pages leaflet, that we succeded in printing, using non graphical interface softwares on Ubuntu. This little operation replaced what used to be done by a 10000 euro software 5 years ago.

Text set on paper is Femke Sneltings "Open Source Software for design" and OsBlogs "How To Print A Booklet In 19 Easy Steps", resulting in a "meta" publication on Constant Verlag.

Print Party! Join!

2006-06-23T13:59:00+02:00

Rendez-vous le 7 juillet a Quarantaine pour une bonne Print Party! Ce sera a 16:00, et ca durera jusque peut-etre 20:00. Ca sera en français avec accent, (et bequilles en anglais et en néerlandais), mené par la Constant Printing + Cooking Team.

Ou l'on apprendra comment mettre en page, imposer et imprimer un booklet avec des logiciels libres!

On pensait que c'était de la Science-Fiction, mais une fois encore les experts se sont trompés: il est possible de faire du graphisme avec du Open Source. C'est en fait assez proche de la cuisine!

Si vous savez faire un gateau, vous saurez faire un livre.

Pour accompagner cette performance, Kate Rich de Bristol fera des cocktails avec du Cube Cola.

Et +Nurse+ nous jouera un mix inspiré sur platines ensoleillées.

Quarantaine, c'est 43 rue Lesbroussart, 1050 IXL, Bruxelles, Belgique www.quarantaine.biz.
On ne saurait trop vous conseiller de visiter!

decodeunicode.org project

2006-03-22T12:34:00+01:00

http://decodeunicode.org

Is an independent online-platform for digital type culture, initiated by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany.

The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has the objectives of creating a basis for fundamental typographic research and facilitating a textual approach to the characters of the world for all computer users.

The website uses freely available data of the Unicode Standard 4.0.1 © The Unicode Consortium, 1990 – 2003, especially UnicodeData.txt

(Some rights reserved. All texts and images on the website are protected by a Creative Commons License. You may reuse and redistribute them for any purpose other than commercial use.)

Xara Xtreme Xbecomes Xopen Xsource.

2006-03-22T12:16:00+01:00

Xara Xtreme is a vector based software. It runs under Windows and Linux environment. It is a "crossover" software, means it manages pixels and vectors at the same time.

After 15 years of proprietary software status, Xara is operating a strategical migration to open source. The fact that Adobe purchased Macromedia put the developper in a uncomfortable concurrencial situation.

Opening the software to GPL is hoped to bring "consolidation" via FLOSS communities, inspired by the succesfull Inkscape model.

The 2 societies are currently in contact to synchronise on a common file format, and to develop a converter which would enable to turn Xara (Xar) into SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics - around which Inkscape is constructed). This would give the ability for both sotwares to import and export numbers of other formats as well.

The Mac OSX version is still in development.
Xara Xtreme on the Mac
We have a new cross-platform code base, WXWidgets based, that is cross platform C++ and should work on the Mac, but we're short of Mac developers and testers that can help progress this. If you're a Mac developer willing to help us please contact us. Our first stage goal is simply to get a working viewer to the same level as the Linux build.

www.xaraxtreme.org

Tigrrrrrrrrrrre!!!

2006-03-20T23:50:00+01:00

Le Tigre, here, is not the translation of a Mac os in french, nor a No-Wave grrrrl band. It's a brand new generalist weekly french magazine that released its first issue 3 days ago. The big thing here is that this mag is entirely set on Scribus, and proove by fact that this FLOSS can be incorporated on a professionnal workflow. The 24 pages magazine took choice of incorporating no ads, and thus depends on the readers.

www.le-tigre.net

Articles are described as wide and various, but precise and entertaining, from comment of worldnews to science fiction. More once touched and seen in real!

LaTeX Project

2006-03-17T15:31:00+01:00

From WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
by Florian Cramer
(p22)

The idea that beauty materializes in numerical proportions according to mathematical laws continues to be popular in scientific and engineering cultures, too. Since the early 1970s, Donald Knuth, widely considered the founder of computer science as an independent academic discipline, published his textbooks under the title The Art of Computer Programming. He understands “art” as the formal beauty and logical elegance of the source code. The software TeX which he wrote to typeset his books correspondingly implements a classicist post-Renaissance typography whose notions of beauty are embedded in Knuth’s algorithms for line spacing and paragraph adjustment. At MIT, Knuth initiated a project God and computers whose results were an exhibition of Bible calligraphies and, in 2001, a book Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. In this book, Knuth remembers how as a student he read a computer program code that he found “absolutely beautiful. Reading it was just like hearing a symphony.” This was how he “got into software,” teaching it as an art rather than a science. The hacker credo put down by Steven Levy in 1983 that “you can create art and beauty with computers” has its roots in Knuth’s teaching. It ultimately means that a program is not a transparent tool for creating beauty—like, for example, a graphics program—, but that it is beautiful by itself. Both schools, highbrow academic computer science and more underground hacker culture, perpetuate a Pythagorean, classicist understanding of art as formal beauty. This concept blatantly lags behind modern concepts of art. Since romanticism and 20th century art, aesthetic understandings of art were not just about beauty, but included the sublime, grotesque and ugly as well. The same is true, implicitly at least, for the Greek and Roman antiquity whose highest art form, tragedies, were about violence and despair.

Download the text here:
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/

A double spread in scribus

2006-03-04T17:08:00+01:00

Thanks to Philip May and Perl5 software that generated text, it was possible to realise a double spread of a "Babels book". Text is composed of the combinatory of the 26 letters of the alphabet, dot, comma and space, as described in Library of Babel, in Fictions Borges book. Those books are 410 page, 40 lines per page and 80 character per line. Capitals were added in the script. Those 2 pages were then set with Scribus.

See the pdf

Obviously, scribus needs a strong amelioration of its ergonomy. It took something like 3 hours to compose those 2 pages.
Here is a Scribus Bug Report, encounted during the exercice:

among other...

But the pdf generator seems to work ok so far, it was very easy to export.

Alpha font

2006-02-27T18:42:00+01:00

Most amazing font so far, the Alphabetum font, for ancient languages. It is now possible to compose text with languages that disappeared 5000 years ago. I have to say all my respect for such a nice and usefull work! Thanks from university researchers that had to redraw all archeologic inscriptions found on sites. Now those texts can circulates.

Juan-José Marcos' Alphabetum font is a large Unicode font covering more than 4000 characters in the most recent version. Although the full font is not free, costing €15 for individual registration, a demo version of the font lacking about 500 glyphs present in the full font can be downloaded for free. Coverage is provided for classic and medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Old Italic-Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene-Gothic, Iberian, Celtiberian, old and middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Runic, Ogham, Ugaritic, Old Persian cuneiform, Phoenician, Linear B, Cypriot, Aegean numbers, old and medieval Nordic.

http://guindo.cnice.mecd.es/~jmag0042/alphaeng.html

Linux Libertine font project

2006-02-27T18:21:00+01:00

The Libertine family font contains around 1500 "western" caracters among which cyrillic, greek, turkish and so on. The font looks classical, between Baskerville and Caslon style. The general impression is a contemporary looking 19th century font. Hints are good looking above 8 points, and is comfortable on screen. Good typography seems to be possible using it.

Letters and fonts are two things in one: On the one hand they are basic elements of communication and fundaments of our culture, on the other hand they are cultural goods and artcraft.
You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to software you'll see those copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts. We want to give you an alternative: This is why we founded The Libertine Open Fonts Project.

http://linuxlibertine.sourceforge.net/

Inkscape Poster

2006-02-22T23:41:00+01:00

Poster done with Inkscape, the context is the visit of Bob Stein at the Jan Van Eyck Academie

Thursday 23 February, 15:00
The Jan Van Eyck Academie
kindly invites you to:
The Tomorrow Book
Robert Stein presentation

Ok, it is time now.

2006-01-20T17:59:00+01:00

Is it possible to get a graphic design professionnal workflow with open source softwares?