January 30th Finally a moment of meeting with you for 9000 km of drawings, tools, stories. Interested in the libre? Curious about our practice? OSP studio welcomes you for a first public session at Variable. 18h30 – Welcoming Presentation and discussions around recent and ongoing OSP studio works. 19h30 Exiled Cuisine (Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico [...]

Over at the Libre Graphics Research Unit we are preparing a second ‘Research Meeting’ that will take place in Brussels from 22 to 25 February 2012. Developers, designers and theoreticians from all over Europe will gather to imagine future Libre Graphics tools together. The theme for this particular edition is Co-position, and we’ll speculate about [...]

Our friends Nadine and Überknackig have opened a nice place, the Might shop, just a few hundred meters of our Variable house using the Crickx font at its full potential!

We used Reglo Bold for the new identity of Radio Panik and we are happy to release it today on the OSP foundry under open source license

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 [...]

Un essai en plusieurs parties, écrit pour ∆⅄⎈, la nouvelle revue des éditions BAT. 5 ans après le début d’OSP, il est temps de faire un point sur les influences sociales des logiciels libres sur notre pratique du design. Aussi disponible comme fichier pdf: Relearn Le texte est écrit à plusieurs mains, sur plusieurs plates-formes, et [...]

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 [...]

Invited at Interpunctie project van Bolwerk, we excavate into the 10+ years of archives by building the first bricks of tools to draw a landscape thanks to bash and python scripts + the legacy Fontforge scripting language.

Housewarming October 14th 15:00 onwards / Constant Variable / Rue Gallait 80 Brussels The 19th century town house at Rue Gallait 80 is now known as Constant Variable. For three years, it will house an arts lab for free, libre and open source software. Next to the Open Source Publishing studio, there is an open [...]

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

We moved.

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.

This Friday, opening of the final show of the Piet Zwart Institute Master Media and Communication: Networked Media. There, you can get this year’s catalogue we were proud to design as alumnis! Flyers and catalogues made only with free software (more about the process very soon!). Friday 1st of July 19.00 to 23.00 Roodkapje, 119-133 [...]

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 [...]

Tot Later has arrived! Presentation this Friday 17 June 19:00-21:00 Constant / Rue du Fortstraat 5, 1060 Brussels ++++++++++++++++++++++ In 2008 An Mertens showed a beta-version of the distributed novel CIAO/Tot Later in the exhibition Place@Space/NowHere in Z33 Hasselt. Years passed by and now she’s ready to present her novel CIAO/Tot Later – the author’s [...]

Our friends from the Master Media Design & Communication: Networked Media are accepting candidates for next academic year until July 1 2011. OSP enthusiastically recommends this exceptional design program, where F/LOSS is the norm: Master Media Design & Communication: Networked Media Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research Willem de Kooning Academy / Rotterdam University Netherlands [...]

Do you remember that we sent a letter a few weeks ago. We are finally expecting an answer from our correspondent and we feel it is time to reveal the content of this letter. Feel free to react to this letter either on this blog, by mail or on any other type centric sites. ======================================== [...]

But some pictures from our two weeks in Vietnam.

Tomorrow/morgen/demain: First Contact! [EN] Tuesday 24 May @ 19:00 the D.I.Y. bookscanner built by/in Hackerspace Brussels will be operated for the first time through a speculative software that Pierre Marchand developed with contributions from John Haltiwanger. The experiment traverses text, image and data and plays with the various textures in-between. The code is under development [...]

It is difficult to believe that Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 is already over. We spent 9 intense days in Montreal to work, talk, meet, present, cook, interview, listen and cross the city by bike. The meeting provoked many discussions about the future of Libre Graphics so we decided to write this report in the form [...]

Shortly before leaving for Open Design Weeks in Vietnam, I received my copy of Fonts in Context from Boekplan in the mail. It’s a start in the direction of generating a higher volume of documentation for Context, an issue which remains a sticking point for broader adoption of the software. Perusing it I came across [...]

Hello ! C’est Hélène, stagiaire chez OSP. Glad to be here and hope learning a lot of thing!

We are busy preparing pre-LGM activities (6-9 May) and happy to report that it looks like an exciting weekend already. As a way to warm up for the Libre Graphics Meeting, StudioXX will host a Digital Pattern Making workshop, a celebrity draw-off and an exhibition. ginger coons is gathering a ‘jury’ of designers, illustrators and [...]

Monday Its akward, it’s unconfortable, but we want to put ourselves in a position of welcoming a happy accident, a trong ruì có may.

The Open Font Library promises to be back in time for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011!

Saturday Our Open Design Weeks in Vietnam kicked off at the Spotted Cow where we went for social drinks. There we met mainly people from IT with programming backgrounds. We also got to know our new friends from Cambodia. This was our first encounter with an on-going theme of translation issues. We found it difficult [...]

Next Tuesday our co-worker Ivan Monroy Lopez relocates to Mexico City to set up the first Latin American branch of OSP. Using 10 hours of time difference in our advantage, we now can serve Free, Libre and Open Source design (almost) around the clock! If you want to join the Mexican revolution, please write to [...]

Good news: You can submit your talk for the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal until April 20. It means you have exactly left to tell us what developers and designers gathering at LGM need to know about. See you soon in Montreal!

After a long journey, we eventually arrived 24 hours later to Ho Chi Minh City: 17.00 here is 12.00 there. To honour the tradition, a group picture in front of our gigantic plane!

Today 5 OSPs travel to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, to participate in Open Design Week. Alex, John, Pierre, Pierre and Stéphanie will be touring through the Mekong Delta to meet up with local F/LOSS fans through workshops, presentations and an exhibition. The second week is reserved for an intense work session with the [...]

Assembly: Friday April 1 (18:00 – 20:00) at PA/PER VIEW art book fair WIELS, Avenue van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels (Belgium) This Friday, OSP participates in a discussion initiated by Agency. Agency is the generic name of a Brussels-based agency that was established in 1992 by Kobe Matthys. Agency constitutes a growing “list of things” that [...]

* April 1 * April 20 is the final deadline for submitting your talk for the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal! Are you a developer, designer or a mix of both and involved in Free, Libre and Open Source Software for creative use? Please feel welcome to propose a talk here: http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk1. We would like [...]

Next Wednesday March 30th = Document Freedom Day (DFD), a global day for document liberation. Look here for events in your country: http://documentfreedom.org/2011/events/

In the excellent new Libre Graphics Magazine, don’t miss the invitation to submit materials for an exhibition that will run parallel to the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal. More details and how to submit at: http://libregraphicsmag.com/tools Deadline: 22 April 2011! Let’s talk about tools for a moment. We, as humans, distinguish ourselves from other [...]

Donate to help F/LOSS developers and designers work together at LGM! Use this code to display a banner on your own website: And this is how it was made: http://stdin.fr/Bazar/Pledgie

The official announcement for LGM 2011! → Submit your talk here → Support LGM generously @ Pledgie → More info on the LGM website: http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ Cutting edge creative tools meet free culture May 10-13, Ecole Polytechnique Engineering School Programmers and artists from around the world are headed to Montreal for the 6th annual Libre [...]

Today, 1st day out of 3 of workshop at Royal College of Art in London. We are doing collective remote publishing by sending commands to Scribus from an IRC channel. We are on irc.freenode.net, channel #rcaws if you want to have a glimpse at it, or do blind design! From 10am to 5pm, London time. [...]

At LGM 2010 in Brussels, we met Hong-Phuc Dang, a young Vietnamese woman full of energy, willing to organize events around Libre Graphics in Asia in addition to her involvement in FOSS/ASIA, a meeting around Free and Open Source Software. We can’t believe it’s been almost a year of planning and that the trip is [...]

Today OSP worked on a brand new super git-repository lay-out, added new fonts to OSP-foundry, advanced the DIN-project, made a start with the cover for Tot Later (a novel by Ana Claese) and in between celebrated that our application for the Libre Graphics Research Unit has been approved. Champagne!

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 [...]

acsr (atelier de création sonore radiophonique) website is now online! We are celebrating tomorrow listening to 2 radiophonic pieces and sharing a meal at La CompilOthèQue, 50 quai des Péniches, Brussels. Website and identity in collaboration with Jérôme Degive (Pica Pica) and WordPress. Featuring Univers Else!

Fresh new display case for Univers Else font, with original Crickx vinyl lettering. Check out Speculoos and OSP’s dead drop and get Univers Else.

Thanks to Paulo Silva aka nitrofurano, Polsku has now a Latin 1 diacritics and ligatures set. The new version is available for download on OSP Foundry.

Gaffer-tape galore at the ULB-campus again, it is that time of year. As always it takes a deep breath before I push the battered swing doors of the main location and dive under in the fluorescent-lit hallways filled with thousands of developers. The yearly Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting gathers participants to [...]

Hello this is Antoine, new intern at OSP. Glad to meet you. OSP-DIN is now ready to go through meta pleins et délies experimentations.

Mirko Tobias Schaeffer (from the excellent text Bastard Culture and a great talk at LGM 2010) wrote us about the one year master programme he is teaching with a.o. Marianne van den Boomen and Ann-Sophie Lehmann at Utrecht University: We combine academic analysis and theory with hands on experience in new media. We’re looking for [...]

Four-hundred posts to OSP-blog since January 20, 2006 when we wrote: OK, It is time now. Browse the archives: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/archives

In collaboration with Jérôme Degive (Pica Pica), OSP is pleased to announce the upcoming launch of the new Atelier de Création Sonore Radiophonique website. Tracks details and generic to follow.

[This is the about section of the the Travels of Baron Munchausen publication ] How should I disengage myself? I was not much pleased with my awkward situation — with a wolf face to face; our ogling was not of the most pleasant kind. If I withdrew my arm, then the animal would fly the [...]

During our current Scribus renderframe experiments day, Ivan shows us a customised WordPress template with a gorgeous index page in Unicode for the Circular Facts website.

What the first half of the new OSP-year looks like from here: January Start with a bang: Monday January 3 all OSPs gather for a Scribus experiment. You’ll hear more about once we get there! Antoine from l’École Estienne, Paris joins us for an internship of three months. We have new plans for some kind [...]

Enjoying the first issue of Libre Graphics Magazine First Flight too? In the mean time, the editorial team started working on a brand new one! The theme for the upcoming magazine is Use Cases and Affordances: Our software tools, in their affordances and potential use cases, define for us, to a certain extent, what we [...]

Nous fêtons demain le premier cours Open Source de l’ERG. In September started a fisrt “arts numériques” open source course at the École de Recherche Graphique. Visit the course wiki. The students will be proud to present the first specimens of their pictures-fonts. And in exclusivity we will play with Pierre Marchand’s new friend Fonzie [...]

We are always thrilled when we see design projects around free culture. Lately the blog Manystuff has enlightened a lot of this kind of projects, either on/with Open Source or around free of charge culture, public domain… Here is a summary: Free Kevin — A Hacker screening series — Can’t find the torrent link anymore… [...]

Archipel is both a permanent collection, a website and a travelling exhibition. It intends to propose an intuitive exploration of adventurous music and images appeared since the early twentieth century. Archipel has chosen to group these discs and films as “islands” involving artists (or works) that share similar creative practices. An archipel that can be [...]

Fresh news from Paris: Since a few months the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie supports the Scribus team. The goal is to make the program ready for new developers and users from Asia and Africa and this is *very* good news for the rest of us too! The project goes under the code name “Scribus-OIF” [...]

On the way to a new text engine, the nice things that will be lost. As of revision 15877, Scribus displays severals paragraphs, fully shaped and featured, but remains uncertain of where to put them. The Scribus/OIF project goes on, aiming, among other things, to make graphic designers a bit less nervous.

H E Y ! Libre Graphics Magazine #1 is out ! Bravo Ana, ginger, Ricardo + the whole team and participants. Follow the details about the production process and order soon your copy from their blog.

The opening talk therefore sounds like a manifest, asking to valorize Free Software, in order to “infiltrate culture in a positive way”. Pierre Marchand, member of the OSP collective, presenting a collaborative ornamental font, supports this proposal totally: “In our domain, the freedom of software is the single tool to completely share culture. It is [...]

After we turned the simplest design into a complicated process involving Fontforge, Subversion, Scribus Python scripter, PoDoFo, glue and good wills, the Dingbats Liberation Fest font (rev.106) is now visible in good company (DejaVu for the closer and some  amazing pieces of art around) at make art – in between design festival.

Courtesy: Inkscape parallel-stroke hatching

make art opening starts at 19 pm Hurry up ! Dingbats Liberation Fest Characters are crowding the walls. Get your D.L.F contributor certificate ✄

Excellent post by Troy Sobotka explaining why designers should collaborate with Free Software projects and stop responding to contests: “We need a round table interaction where literature, art, design, philosophy, psychology, and sociology can be engaged. We need a cross pollination of creative fields and studies. We need to have developer minds and creative minds [...]

We’re very excited about the first issue of Libre Graphics Magazine coming up soon. A place for discussion on the use and development of Libre Graphics seems more relevant than ever. With ginger coons, Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente on the editorial team, support from the Mardigrafe printing house and Studio XX in Montreal, we [...]

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 [...]

The 2010 edition of the Make Art festival will take place at Maison de l’Architecture in Poitiers, France, from the 4th to 7th of November. This year theme is in-between design: rediscovering collaboration in digital art. OSP will give a small lecture and be part of the exhibition with the project Nancy, an installation for [...]

Just out: The fOam Open Sauces book + insert! The book contains essays, recipes and images documenting Open Sauces: “a sequence of experimental courses, matched with drinks, improvised music and esteemed guests. While savouring the foods, the guests will be engaged in table conversations, sharing experiences, recipes and ingredients needed to demystify cultural, environmental, technical [...]

Packt-publishing, big on books about Open Source, now wants us to ‘Vote for our favorite Open Source Graphics Software to win‘. It is a clever campaign I guess: data about popular applications should be useful in deciding what books will sell. Packt gives away one proprietary e-reader to a random voter and I only hope [...]

Last Thursday and Friday OSP gathered in Heure-en-Famenne to discuss future plans and current projects. After almost 5 years of work we wanted to take a bit of time to look back and forward. We made several resolutions and decisions. Some will be already visible in the coming weeks now, others only in the years [...]

This fall @ OSP: Prix Fernand Baudin Prijs Tournée française (Paris, Valence, Nancy, Besançon et Amiens 30/09/2010 → 30/01/2011) Teaching Images numériques – Open source – Chaîne (typo)-graphique ouverte at ERG Submitted proposal to the The Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) to fund a Libre Graphics Research Unit Thinking about The Praise of [...]

New at OSP Works: flyer for Constant which OSP is a subdivision of. 4 different flyers. Play on languages, loops… Made with Scribus. more here

Libre Graphics Magazine is seeking submissions for its first numbered issue, which loosely follows the theme First Encounters/Taking Flight. Submissions can range from the written, to the visual, to the interactive. If it can be flattened and printed, it could appear in our print edition. If it moves or requires user input to be seen [...]

View Larger Map The sixth edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting will take place from 10-13 May 2011 in Montreal, Canada. The local team builds on experience of having organised two earlier meetings in the same city, plus this years’ LGM will make a special effort to connect to the lively art- and design scene [...]

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)!