From Thursday 20th to Sunday 23rd November OSP went to contemplate the Bolwerk archives landscape from the window of Frans Masereel Centrum. As part of Bolwerk‘s residency, we were invited to propose a reading of Bolwerk’s material inbetween its punctuation. Linked to our actual and future projects, this journey also presented itself as a good [...]

As attempt to map visually theater activities accross european theater institutions for the Travelogue project, we propose an atlas with three different kind of visualisations.

A quick glimpse on one of Vincent Meessen’s Cosmographs for the exhibition of his new works at Khiasma (Paris) during the Hantologie des colonies cycle. Using dot language that Vincent began to use quite instantly and Graphviz as a pense-bête to track vibrating paths around Roland Barthes and his grandfather Louis-Gustave Binger.

“À l’extérieur de cette boîte si tranquille, de bouillonnantes transformations s’opèrent également!” — From hand movement to vector curves to hand movement

L’entrepreneur et amateur de texte justifié Kaplan nous livre une articulation des futurs du livre efficace comme son tunnel Powerpoint, voie A et b. Le blog Lafeuille reformule et déploie (2 formats donc). Les torsions qui appuient sur le savoir (à l’esprit dirait peut-être Stiegler) quand le livre est capturé dans une application sur une [...]

A few weeks ago, a 365 pages magazine has been published by Komplot and David Evrard in Brussels. Even if it is not strictly an OSP job (it miss, by exemple, the necessery plural workers), it smells libre graphics around its square ears. Another magazine, Mousse, ask questions, multivoices amongst publishers and designers answer.

En février Monica et Fabien du Théâtre de la Balsamine sont arrivés chez Speculoos, et deux heures après ils sont repartis, sans même vraiment le savoir, avec en plus OSP et stdin. Pierre a senti d’une part qu’une hétérogéneïté de pratiques graphiques serait mieux à même de rendre compte de la tentative d’involution du projet [...]

“I think it is impossible to copyright empty space” (Pierre H quotes Pierre M) We received different responses to our open letter to Monotype that we posted here and on Typophile. Actually, we did get a reply from MonoType’s lawyer, acknowledging our letter, and asking us to identify ourselves as a legal body. We responded [...]

Spring cleaning with a long awaited operation : the release of our OSP DIN. Spring listing our current favorite fonts, in use for projects or planned to be used : Bentham Copse OSP Din Engshrift Droid Serif and Sans Sorts Mill Goudy Inconsolata Libertine Latin Modern Molengo NotCourierSans PT Serif Puritan Quicksand Ume Univers-Else Vollkorn [...]

It’s hard to believe that we are back for more than three weeks from Tel Aviv, where we participated in Open Code Versus Military Culture? Aspects in Israel Digital Culture. It feels both close and very far away. Open Code Versus Military Culture? was initiated by digital artist Tsila Hassine, asking pertinent questions about the [...]

Next week another delegation of OSP travels to Tel Aviv to present at the conference Open Code Versus Military Culture? Aspects in Israel Digital Culture organised by the Shenkar College for Engineering and Design. Following the talk, there will be a worksession at the Israeli Center for Digital Art. From the conference description: “The interest [...]

7 OSP funky geeky sheeps players inTypogravieh lebt’s trailer. Vielen Dank Martin & the typovieh-team. Our Bauhaus typo symposium was more than leben.

At our Bauhaus Weimar presentation, we decide to make jam. So an adaptation of the GPL principles seems useful. (Free Art Licence)

The Radio Panik show “Good morning Stallman” interviews 3 LGM fellas. Audio condensed. Listen to the podcast.

And some open pictures from… the my.monkey Facebook account (via a tagging of Damien and Pierre ×PLMD)!

identi.ca/osp make his best to track our recent activity via our differents IP addresses, where Brussels seems synthetise by 4 positions, here with the background lazy to display, osp frogs above water. A few minutes later, a new osp -Ivan- connection from Schaerbeek, North of Brussels, strangely shrink the scale by positionning a bright new [...]

Les organisateurs du Prix Fernand Baudin nous ont demandé de répondre à trois questions concernant le livre, en vue d’intégrer les réponses dans le catalogue en préparation actuellement. Nos réponses sous forme d’extraits traduits en français du texte publié à la fin du livre. (Full version in English) — Brèves explications du concept/déroulé du livre: [...]

Designing with TeX: episode IV Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi [...]

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier’s appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre’s mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on [...]

Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN – Das Ist Norm – Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to [...]

Dans le cadre du festival “Imaginary Property”, OSP vous invite au Novale jeudi 28 mai 2009 à 19 h. Au programme : le jaune interdit et le rouge bientôt libre, un décodage de morceaux de vie montréalais au LGM 2009, une projection vers des formats inconnus et un aperçu de montage vidéo en mode texte [...]

Now that we cross Alexandre-Prokoudine-magic-glue-between-developers again in the corridors of LGM 2009, we’ve been able to physically get pictures taken by him in his sans-fatigue hunt for images at LGM last year! I don’t know if he gimped the files but on the protraits we’re looking like out of a shiny Rock&Folk magazine… (but it’s [...]

The preparation of LGP 2009 Montreal is on his way (OSP is very excited!) and the LGM website offers this fine view of the planning exercice for the talks. Beautiful way of showing the still open program.

Designing with TeX: episode III Thanks to the super active ConTeXt mailinglist, we are finally able to load our own fonts! And of course, once we know how, we are almost disappointed that it is so easy to do. if you compile this file: \definetypeface[Libertinage][rm][Xserif][Libertinage] \setupbodyfont[Libertinage, 24pt] \starttext \input knuth \stoptext with this command: texexec [...]

Designing with TeX: episode II “Users only need to learn a few easy-to-understand commands that specify the logical structure of a document“. If only we had sooner understood that user here is writer, not designer, we might have given up earlier. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2 goes on to explain: “They almost never [...]

The hard and well documented work of a Dutch Belgian Python artist and designer – Stani – to produce a coin devoted to Dutch contemporary architecture, using only floss. The stroke font he design for it is simply beautiful (currently no info on availability). Via Dave‘s understanding blog.

It’s rentrée day at OSP and we’re shaking our website. The future hours days will show some chaos on pages and categories and html renderings…

Towards is a cartographic project close to OSP and the second publication is finally out and available after a long 9 months of preparation. Following our informations, it’s the last one that will be produced using proprietary software … But the timeline present on the cover and backcover, made from all the posts written since [...]

In a déjà old interview (2000) by Advogato, Donald Knuth (TeX and Metafont author) answers in his sometimes-very-short sometimes-generous style. In the middle of these all interesting things, a few exchanges about relations between mathematics, fonts, free and money. Enough close to some parts of talks at Wroclaw, like the Dave Crossland’s one, and some [...]

Kaveh Bazargan has patiently recorded the sound and the screen of every interventions at LGM. Here is ours: http://media.river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm2008/quicktime/0103-Harrisson.html. (At the end of the conference, we discovered that Kaveh is a TeX guy for 20 years, so we’ve asked him a few questions. Transcript will come.)

Thanks to Andy Fitzsimon for the picture (in CC full open)!

This Wednesday, join us for our type workshop in the OPT cultural center in Wrocław from 11am to ongeveer 6pm. For those who arrive directly from the airport, you can begin with this path then please print this map, because it seem that it is not easy to find for taxi driver (our journey was [...]

Since the first time I’ve used an autotrace program -Adobe Streamline 1.0 in the early nineties- I’ve been disappointed by the unavoidable angles in curves, named kinks or cusps, that pledged the vector output. Lots of designers and developers seem not to care about it, but for me it is simply the difference between artificial [...]