I’m looking forward to the stories that may be unfolding these days here at SVG Open. Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of “Standards and their Stories”, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. Among other things, this introductory chapter makes a point for the invisibility and pervasiveness of standards standards are so [...]

On our (virtual) bookshelves: Download the list as .csv file: OSP-library_030810 The OSP-library is a modest pile of books that we think is relevant to our practice. Some we have read and others we should. We’ll keep adding titles; suggestions welcome! After testing several ways to catalogue the collection, we settled with LibraryThing for the [...]

In the mail today: From Taipei (Taiwan): Freesouls. Captured and released. Joi Ito, 2008 From Weimar (Germany): Lorem Ipsum: Zentralorgan der Freien Klassen Kommunikation. 2010 Thank you Christopher + Martin

This interview may be a good read. It deals with some aspects of the “current state” (June 2010) of SVG implementations. It’s got a really sweet format. It’s a two-sided interview, meaning that Doug Scheppers and Patrick Dengler interview each other. It’s not often that I come across interviews that are interleaved: I asked Patrick [...]

We’re happy to launch our foundry, today. Have a look http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/foundry There’s no excuse to not write more this summer! They’ve been made using free tools: FontForge, Inkscape… They’re released under free licenses. Some are collaborative works. Some will be in development. Little materials light peculiar happy. Little long length there louder. Enjoy your weekends.

We’re busy closing the books on LGM 2010 and soon deciding where to go for LGM 2011 (Brasil? Montreal? Vietnam? Follow the discussion at: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create) so we almost did not notice that it’s only a very little stretch to our initial goal of raising 10.000$ on Pledgie

During LGM 2010, Ana, ginger and Ricardo (+ a.l.e and Femke) edited, designed and published Libre Graphics Magazine #0. You can download it here: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2010/download/lgmag_00.pdf

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)

Constant pictures: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=32177 Overview of pictures + posts: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2010/index.php?p=en/review Video registrations: http://river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm-2010

Yesterday, OSP was on a road trip to Weimar to give a talk at the Typogravieh Lebt symposium organized by the Bauhaus-university of Weimar. We are now at the venue, about to start… It’s going to be great!

The people attending this workshop will learn about one way to dissect the shapes of the latin alphabet, and use this theorical model to make a typeface together in a fast paced design game. The game will involve drawing letters on paper, making use of a real life version control system, and uploading the results [...]

Preparing badges for LGM-participants More pictures: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=31913

This sunny Sunday afternoon, Ricardo, ginger, ale, Ana and Femke gather in the Constant office backyard to get ready for LGM arriving in town.

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/

Here are snapshots of SILEX-LEX round 1. Artists, designers and illustrators experimented with Inkscape, a Rhizograph and each other’s layers. Round 2 follows next week in preparation of the vernissage on May 7.

Was it volcanic dust? Or something else? Important documents that were mailed weeks ago from Brussels to Moscow unfortunately never arrived. Today we sent them again by courier to make sure this indispensable LGM-participant will be able to get a visa for Belgium in time. All we can do now is wait and hope they [...]

Deadline: Saturday May 1 Please submit your talk for LGM 2010 at: http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2010/Submit_Talk Here is the latest press-release: San Francisco and Brussels, Thursday 15 April 2010 – The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual working conference for the free software graphics application community. Developers from the full spectrum of graphics applications — image editors, photography, [...]

OSP defied volcanic dust and gathers in Berlin to present and discuss the first stage of the GenderArtNet project at project space uqbar. With: Bettina Knaup, Maria Ptqk, Bojana Pejic, Anne Quirynen, Femke Snelting, Ludivine Loiseau, Anne-Laure Buisson, Nicolas Malevé and others.

Gender Art Net poster is now ready for folding. Project presentation and workshop – Berlin – April 16-17 _2010 (more coming) 1000 posters – A2 recto black – verso CMYK 1 plis horizontal – 4 zig zag + 1 roulé

You’re welcome for a series of talks by Dave Crossland

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

OSP se prépare à my.monkey Dessin/grattage Unicode à la mine de plomb, scriptage Scribus vers étiquettes, collection d’objets, préparation d’un mode d’emploi et suivit du projet en place en ligne. Encore beaucoup de quoi s’occuper. Demain premier tests debuggage de Nancy.

NotCourierSans posters have been sent to Anderlues, Berlin, Bordeaux, Bruxelles, Buvrinnes, Cambrai, Chicago, Garden Grove, Gent, Helsinki, Ixelles, JKL, Köln, Merley Wimborne Dorset, Montesson, Munich, Portland, Romrod, Roscoff, Rotterdam, Saint Etienne, Saint-Maurice, Santa Barbara, Sèvres, Singapore, Southampton, Venegazzù, V.N. Gaia, Winton Bournemouth Dorset, Zürich

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

Last sunday we drawed a book. 675 417 km2 pour Luce contour lines of France scale 1:385142 interval : 30 m strokes : 0.05 pt 16 binded sections cover : green cardboard 300 g + clothed back single copy Sur base des élévations au pas de 250m proposées au téléchargement par l’I.G.N. France. Calcul des [...]

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. So, [...]

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 [...]

The Dingbats Liberation Fest adventure continues in Nancy from March 25 to May 6. Invited by the my.monkey gallery, OSP présentera quelques uns de ses travaux et ouvrira un nouvel atelier Dingbats Liberation Fest into the grid.

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!

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: [...]

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 [...]

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010! Download flyers: cuttingedge.zip

“Collaboration can be so strong it forces hard boundaries. The boundaries can intentionally or unintentionally exclude the possibility to extend the collaboration. Potentially conflict can also occur at these borders” For this years’ Transmediale Festival, the F/LOSS Manuals project took up the challenge to write, edit and publish a collaborative publication in 5 days while [...]

Alexandre Leray and Lauren Grusenmeyer just finished an intense collaboration for the website of the literary platform nY— website en tijdschrift voor literatuur, kritiek & amusement, voorheen yang & freespace Nieuwzuid.

nY-web exists indepently next to the paper edition with it’s own editorial staff, writers categories and settings. While nY is a magazine with a profound literary history it confirms it’s existence as an independent web platform, that is to say — it uses full virtues of publishing online.

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 +

The Hadopi is a big thing in France. At its origin, a piece of legislation that implements the three strikes model for illegal downloads. You receive three warnings and then you are ‘banned’ from the internet. The authority who is in charge of applying the sanction is the Hadopi. A new logo has been created [...]

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 posts: [...]

O S P Noisettes – Black – Melk

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

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

Yi and Femke consider cooking heartless vegan food from now on We’re correcting the second edition of the Puerto Cookbook (first edition sold out!) and stumble over a trivial but frustrating small bug in Scribus. Maybe too long to explain here (you’re welcome to read our bug report), but it means a lot of scrolling [...]

Earlier this year, we were invited to work on the identity of the Brussels-based Cimatics A\V Platform. Cimatics is a framework for initiating and facilitating audiovisual productions, events, publications and workshops. To launch the new identity, we developed a new family of fonts! We hope you’re ready for the libre dingbats attack URW Gothic L [...]

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 [...]

Can’t help but re-blog: friend & neighbour Michael Murtaugh is experimenting with SVG animation, using svgweb to make this cat spin http://automatist.org/blog/?p=139

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 [...]

← 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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Found on the developper’s website: The image mosaic plug-in for the GIMP is no longer supported or distributed. Mr. Robert Silvers, the holder of a patent related to the technology that was used in the plug-in, argued that the software would directly infringe his patent rights. It is not clear if the patent is applicable [...]

After the release of our Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek, all the drawings and illustrations now are available as clipart on Open Clip Art Library. Thanks to nitrofurano: download all files in one go with wget! Download script and run from the commandline with: $ bash kitchenclipart.sh Let’s cook together

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 in our neighbourhood St. [...]

“Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航: Lǜbà·Huājì Hùháng) recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, causing the barring of this image of pink color pigs.” The Chinese government has mandated that, beginning July 1, every PC sold in China must include a censorship program called Green Dam. This software is designed to monitor Internet connections and [...]

22 June, 16:00 @ Puerto, Varkensmarkt 23, Brussels Join us this afternoon for the long awaited festive launch of the Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek: 70 delicious recipes, written, translated (Dutch and French) and illustrated in collaboration with the inhabitants of Puerto. Puerto is an organisation working from the center of Brussels, where they generously [...]

[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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’m in Stuttgart for a week to teach a workshop. In the school library, I read Eye Magazine.

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 [...]

These days i’m in Malmö for The Art of the Overhead festival. For some years now, this art festival has done media archeology about the overhead projector. There was a workshop/space this week, there will be performances this weekend, there will be a psychedelic closing party next weekend, etc. We’re happy to see that the [...]

Notes from print/pixel Last week, OSP attended the print/pixel conference in Rotterdam, a two day event gathering publishers, designers, marketeers and document engineers to look at the ever shifting relation between digital and paper publishing.1 For an integral report, see blog-posts by Jouke Kleerebezem and Arie Altena here: http://blog.wdka.nl/communication-in-a-digital-age. Our notes are fragmentary. The organisers [...]

on the way back from LGM Montréal – Trudeau airport. Sonore version will be coming soon…

Our camarades are back. This time in The Netherlands.

A new version of the impolite NotCourierSans is available on the Open Font Library : NotCourierSans 1.1

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 [...]

1. The show must go on. 2. The slides are not the content. 3. I try not to open a terminal in front of people. 4. It’s the engineers who are responsible for the bugs and explosions. 5. The preferences are the graveyard of any good idea. 6. The more links an architect got on [...]

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 [...]

LGM Montreal 2009. OSP reporting has started. Here are the first pictures.

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, [...]

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.

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 http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/index.php?level=album&id=28 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 [...]

(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. [...]

Under the ambitious title ‘Jeffrey Zeldman Discusses the Future of Open Source‘ (filed under: ‘The Internet’), the CSS guru compares the use of Open Source Content Management Systems to what webstandards did for the web. Looking forward to hear more… and will he mention SVG? Excerpt from a longer interview, soon available here too: http://bigthink.com/ideas/jeff-zeldman-discusses-the-future-of-open-source [...]

OSP participe actuellement au développement du projet Gender Art Net. Gender Art Net propose de créer un atlas interactif donnant accès à différentes vues et lectures d’un ensemble de positions artistiques feministes dans l’Europe contemporaine.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

Felix Kubin writes: “As an antidote to globalisation, Ich Bin suggest local megalomania: Mulhouse for capital! ‘Avec le Gewuerz et le Schnaps.’ The record was designed by the talented Monsieur Harrisson, a French refugee now residing in Brussels (…)” So, OSP makes an exception for Harissons’ *last ever* design in proprietary software: we’re proud to [...]

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 [...]

Monday 24 March 2009 Ada Lovelace Day “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” http://www.promessotheque.com/AdaLovelaceDay Friday 27 March 2009 Thank A Developer Day “The general idea is to appreciate the creators behind your favorite [...]

03.03.2009 18:39 @ Chaussée de Waterloo / Porte de Hal, Brussels (sighted by Wendy): http://liberafiontes.jottit.com/

the workshop’s first publication is ready. every participant has created a fictional petites annonces for it. some pictures of making, collating and distributing. we’re also on irc at #crying_room on irc.freenode.org http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=26

on the first day of our workshop at bordeaux, we decided to collectively re-enact an esther ferrer performance. this is a youtube that gives an idea of her movements. with this as starting point, we drew our own paths in the capc…

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 [...]

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

(Call forwarded from Isabelle Massu) + + + + + + + + + + + + Museums narrate the history of man’s evolution through the display of tools (silex, knife, jar, etc.). In contrast, we are looking for useless tools. This call will result in a vitrine of objects titled ‘Object Inutile’ to be [...]