A brand new version of the Open Clip Art Library just came out!
26175 (and growing) scalable vector graphics, all available under a public domain license: they may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods [...]

5 years of Free, Libre and Open Source design experiments. Now available in chronological order: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/works

We asked your opinion: Should the logo we proposed for the Libre Graphics Meeting drip or not? 50 readers voted, and yes was selected in total 51 times and no 34 times (more than one answer possible). Apart from that, strong opinions were voiced on- and offline. Interestingly, these often were against the drip. [...]

Ricardo Lafuente and Ana Carvalho imported/exported a Print Party to Porto. With live Fortune Cookies … how brave! (Recipe for cookies + messages)

Remember that we entered a subsidy dossier in October 2009?
The Design and Architecture committee of the Flemish ministry for culture has decided to grant our application and support LGM 2010.
Besides the fact that any financial support is more than welcome in hard times like these, it is above all an encouraging expression of support for [...]

Alexandre Leray has written a nice tutorial on how to create your own pledgie-badge: http://rw.stdin.fr/CookBook/Pledgie
Thank you ginger coons for your tasty habanero pepper and don’t forget to donate to http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926!

“Livre de texte dense, a priori sans soucis de graphisme, et je découvre que c’est tout l’inverse.”1
More pictures: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=30910
“Book of dense text, a priori without concern about graphic design, and I discover that it’s quite the opposite” Ariane Bosshard in: Prix Fernand Baudin: les plus beaux livres à Bruxelles et en Wallonie 2009 [↩]

Anything else we can do to make you donate a few dollars to LGM2010 ?
<a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner.png’></a>
<a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner_red.png’></a>
<a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner_navy.png’></a>

At the yearly Libre Graphics Meeting, developers and users of our favorite tools get together to work on better software. For some of them, a trip to Brussels is easy to fund, others cannot afford the journey without our help. Let’s pull our resources together and raise 10.000 $ (7350 €) so that they can [...]

Vote Now!

26 February – 10 March 2010

Exhibition in Brussels presenting the bookawards and nominations of the Fernand Baudin Prize 2009, the prize of the Most Beautiful Books in Brussels and Wallonia.
BIP
Rue Royale, 2-4
1000 Brussels
Opening, award ceremony of the honorary diploma’s + release of the catalogue: 25th of February 2010 at 6 pm

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010!

Download flyers: cuttingedge.zip

Poster and flyer designed and produced in OpenOffice
This week and next, colleague and friend An Mertens (a.k.a. Ana Foor) works out of the Elsene local library Sans Souci. She’ll be listening to your account of meeting a loved one for the first time, those habits that keep your relationship alive or which imaginary place [...]

Pour le numéro de janvier consacré à la visualisation de données, le magazine français étapes: ouvre une double page à OSP pour notre carte Cinéma du réel 2009.

> voir +

Tracks in Electr(on)ic Fields, published by Constant and designed by OSP with ConTeXt and Scribus, has been awarded one of 9 prizes for

The Most Beautiful Book of Brussels and Wallonia
✵ ✯ ✵

More about the prize: http://www.prixfernandbaudinprijs.be
About the design and production process (also included in the publication):

The Making Of

Related [...]

Friday December 11
Location: CASCO, Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht (NL)
☔ ✈ ❀ ☺ ❍ ✌ ☺ ✈ ❉
Next week, OSP is happy to re-play Dingbat kitchen with students from the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design.
“Dingbats have sneaked into most computers nowadays. They’re as much a part of the Unicode Standard as the [...]

Ludi draws a giant 26FD Unicode dingbat (from the recent 5.2 character additions)
More images: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=29200

Thursday Jeudi 26/11
Dingbat Liberation Fest + Populated Fonts
@ Verbindingen/Jonctions 12: By Data We Mean
Zennestraat 17 Rue de la Senne, Brussels Bruxelles

Tuesday Mardi 24/11
Booklaunch: Tracks in electr(on)ic fields
@ Verbindingen/Jonctions 12: By Data We Mean
Zennestraat 17 Rue de la Senne, Brussels Bruxelles

After heated debates, intensive collaborative working sessions and many hesitations, OSP feat. Alexandre Leray finally proposed a new identity for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting to the Libre Graphics community.
Since the next meeting will take place in in our home town Brussels, we felt that it was important to at least try to shift [...]

← This letter proves that we just handed in a dossier at the Ministry of Culture, Youth, Sport and Brussels (Vlaamse Gemeenschap). With Constant colleague Peter Westenberg, OSP wrote an application to ask for support for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010. There is only a very small chance that it will make it (LGM is [...]

27 – 30 May 2010 in De Pianofabriek, Brussels

Still nearly 9 months to go, but preparations for a next edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels have started.
In our quest for the ultimate LGM 2010 venue, we checked out many potential spaces, but finally settled for De Pianofabriek [...]

[en français, voir ci-dessous]
Next spring, the fifth Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) will take place in Brussels, Belgium. In May 2010, users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source creative software gather in the European capital for the collective sharing of creativity, innovation and ideas.

Yesterday OSP received a Plantin-Moretus prize 2009 for best designed book in the category non fiction. The jury about Cross-over: “It was love at first sight“. The book, published by BAM and Lannoo and edited by Liesbeth Huybregts, uses Libre Fonts and is produced with Scribus and many other F/LOSS tools. We think it is [...]

Our colleagues from Open Source Video published a video-registration of the discussion that took place at the yearly Journées du Libre.
Enjoy Loic Vanderstichelen, Stéphane Noël, Michel Cleempoel and Marc Wathieu as they present with humour and enthusiasm why F/LOSS is relevant for art- and design education (in French).
http://osvideo.constantvzw.org/journees-du-libre-09/

This foggy fog second day of LGM starts in the run to arrive on time for our talk.
In the middle of the day, Ginger Coons put the fluid into the audience, and his very vigorous talk bring a rare momentum of open and deep discussion at LGM. So just before eating, we have a more [...]

4 + ½ OSP’s are on their way to Montreal, Canada where they will participate in the Libre Graphics Meeting from 6-9 May (expect more news as soon as they land). Next Saturday May 9, a special session of Open Source Open Course in the context of Journées du Libre with amongst others Michel Cleempoel, [...]

25 April to 31 May, open every weekend from 14:00-18:00
Opening: Friday 24 April 18:00-24:00
Rue de la Senne 17, Brussels

For the opening of a temporary workspace at Zennestraat 17 Rue de la Senne, we have installed the Constant Take Away Archive, a retrospective of books, posters, CD’s and flyers, published by Constant since 1997. It’s a [...]

(forwarded from the research programme Communication in a digital age, Rotterdam)
PRINT/PIXEL
International conference on the shifting relation between online and print publishing
Tuesday-Wednesday 12-13 May 2009 | 12-17:00 (public sessions), 20-22:00 (professional sessions)
The conference investigates the shifting relationship between online and print publishing. Both can no longer be separated, but complement each other. Yet few advanced comprehensive [...]

From the CBUD-mailinglist:
Subject: RE: FW: Licensee Application
From: “DUURKOOP, JULIA”
Date: Wed, 1 April 2009 11:20:25 -0400
To: “Daniel Fary”
Dear Daniel:
Thank you for your inquiries and follow-up e-mails. After consulting with executives, engineers and lawyers at the Company, we have decided to insert a series of gray tones to the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. The Company has [...]

Tuesday 31 March 13:00-16:00
Auditoire P7 • Erg, 87, Rue du page, 1050 Bruxelles
At Open course / Open source, OSP performs a second run of a Print Party that happened almost a year ago at the exact same location. This time we have changed roles to serve you another assorted collection of stories about engineered fonts, [...]

mardi 31 mars 2009 @ ERG, Bruxelles

Open Course / Open Source : une journée d’information et de rencontre sur le logiciel libre dans le domaine de l’art. Présentations, partage d’expériences, print-party and more …
Auditoire P7 • Erg, 87, Rue du page, 1050 Bruxelles
http://www.multimedialab.be/blog/?p=1204

03.03.2009 18:39 @ Chaussée de Waterloo / Porte de Hal, Brussels (sighted by Wendy):

http://liberafiontes.jottit.com/

View Larger Map
OSP is preparing for a long drive: Pierre, Yi, Ivan and Femke leave Brussels Tuesday morning to be later joined by another Pierre (our special guest), Harrisson and Ludivine (now in Paris producing a tape/vinyl version of their worldmap for Cinéma du Réel), in Bordeaux. There we’ll meet an interdisciplinary team of students [...]

“With the written word an absolute fundamental component of daily communication, typography and fonts are vital to providing aesthetic harmony and legibility to our textual works. There are thousands of fonts available, of which only a small number are useful or any good for setting vast quantities of text, and of which an even smaller [...]

5 to 7 March, Bordeaux
We’re preparing a journey to Bordeaux, France where OSP will contribute to the conference Edit: Norms, formats and supports with a workshop and a lecture.
From the conference description:
“Signs and pictograms which organize the flow of movement in cities and towns according to graphic “pie charts” and other diagrams, which serve to [...]

Lots of work going on the OSP Studio.
Here are few of our recent production:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Logo for
Le Vecteur
Cultural space in Charleroi city

Button version:

This logo that can be adapted in multiform patterns:

= = = = = = = = = = = = [...]

Just out and hopefully in the post soon: The Official Scribus Manual! For less than 30 euros, we ordered ourselves 438 pages of printed documentation, examples and other invaluable info. And at least €12 from each copy goes towards the Scribus project.
Get yours here:
http://www.flesbooks.com/scribus1.3manual/

Recorded in FoAM’s Open Kitchen, 15 November 2008.
Sounds (raw!): http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/documents/sound/kitchen
Playlist & credits: conduite.pdf
Images:
Peter Westenberg: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=22398 (Free Art License)
Alex Davies: http://flickr.com/photos/alexdavies/sets/72157609143437321/ (All rights reserved)

Saturday November 15, 15:00 (doors open: 14:30)
Live broadcast from FoAM, Koolmijnenkaai 30-34 Brussels
Listen on-line: http://www.constantvzw.be:8000/kitchen.ogg
Emission en Français + English
Studio audience welcome!
As part of the ongoing series Verbindingen/Jonctions 11, OSP prepares a live radio broadcast in the FoAM Open Kitchen. Experimenting with the displacement of multi sensory experiences, we’ll think out loud about the preparation and [...]

Designing with TeX: episode I
OSP is currently working on a book containing essays, interviews and images following from the Constant festival/seminar Tracks in electronic fields and we are laying it out in LaTeX!
LaTeX is a tool developed in the context of academic publishing, specifically for technical or scientific documents. It combines markup à la CSS [...]

Just arrived from the printer: Routes + Routines, a booklet designed by OSP’s Yi Jiang and Ludivine Loiseau documenting Peter Westenberg’s Hasseltse Netwerkwandelingen.

The OSP’s have gathered around their respective working tables in Brussels and Barcelona, to prepare Software History Mapping Night, tonight from 20:30 – 22:00 (GMT+1).
For this occasion, Nicolas has created a rudimentary, quick, lo-tech collaborative mapping tool:
http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map
http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map/sandbox (crazy layers!)*

Wednesday 22 October 20:30-22:00
In a first attempt to draw a collaborative map of the many different tools that together define the practice of digital design, OSP attempts to recollect facts and anecdotes gathered over the last few years.

At Software history mapping night we’ll gather around the table to start a visual cartography of design software. [...]

Hi, OSP.
I found you on Open Font Library. I am building a website containing webmasters resources, and I’d like to have 3 original exclusive fonts that I can give away to members who join my site.
I’d like to pay you to create 3 original fonts – are you willing?
If you have 3 old fonts on [...]

← We printed this A1 poster to launch our first free font NotCourier-sans – it explains how it was made and why (and it is also our way of paying homage to FontForge).
If you want to receive a copy, please send an e-mail to: ivan at textzi.net with ‘NotCourier-sans poster’ in the subject header and [...]

Planet Open Fonts
“Planet Open Fonts is a window into the lives and work of people forming the open font community” writes Nicolas Spalinger in the editorial of this very useful aggregration page, and OSP is proud to be included: http://planet.open-fonts.org/
Create @ f.d.o.
Another useful collection of feeds is at http://create.freedesktop.org/ bringing news from projects connected to [...]

500 unique books installed in Worm, Rotterdam.
Giant pixel image by Gordo Savicic and Danja Vassiliev.
More images: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=23

For a while already, we wanted to experiment with the Scribus Scripter API in a printed job and a catalogue for the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media design graduation show formed the perfect excuse.

            _          _
           | | o      | |                  o
   _   __  | |     ,  | |         _   ,_       _  _  _|_
 |/ \_/  \_|/  |  / \_|/ \      |/ \_/  |  |  / |/ |  |
 |__/ \__/ |__/|_/ \/ |   |_/   |__/    |_/|_/  |  |_/|_/
/|                             /|
\|                             \|
   _   __,   ,_  _|_
 |/ \_/  |  /  |  |  |   |
 |__/ \_/|_/   |_/|_/ \_/|/
/|                      /|
\|                      \|
vendredi le 27 juin 2008
OSP est très heureux de vous annoncer le lancement de sa première fonte en licence libre: la NotCourier-sans.
Nous serions ravis de vous retrouver autour d’un live lay-out, des Jiaozi/Pierogi et de quelques surprises (polonaises) lors de cette Print Party qui aura lieu à:
La Compilothèque
vendredi le 27 juin 2008 à 20h00
50, Quai [...]

Kanttekeningen bij een databank documents our investigation into the inner workings of the database of BAM, the Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual and media art.
To visualise the data stored, we wrote a plugin in Inkscape, manually generated graphs and scripted .svg – you can read everything about what we found and how we worked [...]

June 27, 19:00 20:00 @ Compilothèque*
Polish Print Party
With: launch of NotCourier-sans, OSP FAQ, live lay-out, Jiaozi/Pierogi and more.

*50 Quai des Péniches 1000 Brussels

Hot off the press: CROSS-over, Kunst, media en technologie in Vlaanderen.
Published by BAM / Lannoo and designed by OSP

Matthew Fuller: One of the things that is notable about OSP is that the problems that you encounter are also described, appearing on your blog. This is something unusual for a company attempting to produce the impression of an efficient ’solution’. Obviously the readers of the blog only get a formatted version of this, as [...]

With 9 Media Design students graduating this summer from the Piet Zwart Institute, OSP’s Harrisson is busy producing 500 different books – all in Free Software of course. The books contain essays, images, project documentation and typographic experiments and will be printed using the Mute POD system.
Image: Inkscape Clone Tile Color Randomization plus Align and [...]

The end of our participation in the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 is in sight…
Over the last few days we have seen many intriguing, surprising and interesting talks; we discovered new tools, rediscovered ‘old’ ones and made connections with developers, users and standards-officials — LGM has been again an inspiring adventure.
We interviewed Dave [...]

David Bargenda’s photos: http://flickr.com/photos/opt-art/tags/opensourcepublishing/

With a group of 20 courageous participants and the help of open type activists Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger we are using Inkscape, Gimp and FontForge to produce a typeface in a day. We have named it W Drogę (On Our Way, En Route in Polish) and it should be [...]

We are preparing our print party for tomorrow… Introducing Not Courier Sans (a re-take font), serving Original Covers (a playlist specially prepared for you) plus homemade jiaozi, ravioli and/or pierogi. Join us at 19:00 in Café Mleczarnia, Wroclaw (Poland)!

On our way from Berlin to Wroclaw, OSP managed to photograph almost every letter in the Polish roadsignage alphabet. We are preparing for the Local Universal workshop and still looking for F, Q, X and H (capital + lower case). If you happen to come across one, please send us a picture?

OSP on it’s way!

Wednesday May 7 in Wrocław, Poland
Running up to the Libre Graphics meeting 2008, OSP invites designers, programmers and typographers to work on a collaborative design project. Inspired by modular systems for road sign lettering, and a long interest in fonts designed by engineers, we would like to work with you on an impossible project: to [...]

OSP is preparing for a hectic week in Wrocław, Poland (3 t/m 11 May). At this years Libre Graphics Meeting we give a one day workshop in Ośrodek Postaw Twórczych (Creative Arts centre), perform a Print Party and present our work. The LGM program is packed with talks and we’ll hopefully record a few [...]

With * new * OSP Yi Jiang we are currently working on typography and lay-out for CROSS-over: Kunst, Media en Design in Vlaanderen, a publication edited by Liesbeth Huybrechts and published by BAM / Lannoo.

The book is layed-out in Scribus and contains various database visualisations generated in Inkscape (in collaboration with Michael Murtaugh). [...]

Opening tomorrow!

Signage for The Pavilion of Provisionary Happiness by OSP. The font will be released under an open license soon. More images: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=7

more images here: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=13
and here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/…

Info: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/?p=407
Recette: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/recipes
Pour faire une 4/4 Print Party, il faudra:

2 fours électriques
16 œufs
1 kg de beurre
1 kg de sucre blanc fin
1 kg de farine
3 tabliers
1 raclette en caoutchouc (pour racler les plats avec facilité)
1 rouleau de papier cuisson
1 pair de ciseaux
2 cuillères à soupe
4 fourchettes
4 spatules en bois
1 mixeur
2 maniques
1 tamis (pour la farine)
2 fouets [...]

Issue Magazine launch: Friday March 21 18:00 – 19:30
Log on via: http://mixedsources.tk/
For the launch of Issue Magazine, Stéphanie Vilayphiou and Alexandre Leray are hosting an on line round table with Arie Altena, Jouke Kleerebezem and Harrisson.

A late announcement for an ultra useful tool: Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov have released UniConvertor, a universal vector graphics translator. It uses the sK1 engine to convert one format into another.
With UniConvertor you can now convert files from: CorelDRAW ver.7-X3 (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX), Adobe Illustrator up to v. 9 (AI postscript based), Postscript (PS), Encapsulated Postscript [...]

[All lectures have been archived + will be on line soon!]
Jonctions/Verbindingen 10 Festival has started! Follow lectures + discussions on line: http://www.constantvzw.com/vj10/live
OSP selection:
Sunday 25/11 | 20:45InfoEnclosure-2.0 Dmytri Kleiner
Saturday 1/12 | 12:00Open source software usability Görkem Çetin
Saturday 1/12 | 17:00From centres of calculation to centres of envelopment: intensive movement in digital signal processing Adrian Mackenzie
Saturday 1/12 [...]

2 day Free Operations workshop at Werkplaats Typografie

We nearly missed our train back to Brussels while meeting Dave Crossland. At the station we talked about the history of font editing software, about the ‘free font movement’ and everything that could become possible once fonts and font editing software are free. We were also excited about how (and why!) Dave wants to [...]

“What we make is often defined by what tools we can use to make it” is the motto of an Open Source Publishing event coming up in London.
OSP will assist Simon Worthington and Laura Oldenburg (Mute) at this event, which is hosted by Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design.

http://nm-x.com/event/2007/11/open-source-publishing-briefing

Constant Verlag re-publishes material from the depth of the Constant Archives in A5 cahiers of maximum 48 pages. Some of those texts are available on line as well, others are just saved on one of our harddrives; some written in French, others in English or Dutch; recent or as early as 1997. In addition to [...]