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 [...]

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:
+/- [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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.

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) [...]

Our camarades are back. This time in The Netherlands.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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.

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

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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. [...]

“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 [...]

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.

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
- – – – – – – – [...]

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 [...]

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/

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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

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!

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.

“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!

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 [...]

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!

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 [...]

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. [...]

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

(Inkscape, Gimp and Scribus)

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 [...]

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.

Schablonenschrift A – Din1451 – August 1949
Inkscape drawing.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Design Tools for Designers, Femke Snelting
19 steps to do a Booklet, OsBlog
Text available on line: OSBlog
PDF lay-out: berlin_pp.pdf
PDF cover: cover_berlin.pdf
License: Licence Art Libre
Date of publishing: 13-09-2006 (Wizard of OS – Berlin)

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Open Source Font in True Type format.
Broodthaers font will appear as Mallarme in the font list.

Download here

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

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