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

“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 test [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 kindly supported our [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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

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

The FLOSS+Art book is finally rolling off the print-on-demand press and in the spirit of the kinds of practices described in the book, GOTO10 distributes our ’source files’ as a bittorrent:1
Rather than just providing a “free” PDF, FLOSS+Art.v1.1.eBook-GOTO10 is also available and contains all the Fonts, Images, PDF and Scribus source files that were used [...]

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

Button version:

This logo that can be adapted in multiform patterns:

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

“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 [...]

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
- – – – – – – – [...]

Out now: The Mag.net reader 3: Processual Publishing. Actual Gestures, edited by Alessandro Ludovico and Nat Muller.
From the introduction:
“a radical change is to be detected between the lines: publishing on paper is not about rigorously selling and distributing content to a specific target readership. It is more a ‘gesture’ that creates a space of intimacy [...]

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

← 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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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

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.

“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!

Virginie and Laurence checking the V/J10 program in real size.
Poster is an excellent tool to print .eps or .ps documents in tiles. You can adjust the final size of the file, the amount of overlap, size of the media you print on, work from a percentage (‘enlarge 500%’) etc. Install poster through Synaptic package manager [...]

The Linux Foundation OpenPrinting work group, organises a get-together 24-27 September in Montreal.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/SummitMontreal
As stated on their site, the printing activities of the Linux Foundation revolve around a few focal points:

For printer manufacturers, we want to make it easier to produce drivers that work across distributions and to get those drivers in the hands of end [...]

Frog and Prince is a fairytale featuring free software, python scripting and an open font. The story was premièred at LGM 2007 (Montréal, Canada), and formed the centerpiece of the Canadian Printing Breakfast (Brussels, June 2007). Below is everything you need to make the recipe, but you can also browse through sample documents for [...]

Impressions from Canadian Printing Breakfast in Nepomuk Bar, Brussels. More images in Constants Image Repository.
Special thanks: An, Wendy & Pierre (serving), Ivan (Python), Nurse (records), Peter (pictures), Nicolas (printing), Veronique (City Min(e)d).

Samedi 16 Juin
Nepomuk Bar – City Mine(d) – Rue Saint-Jean Nepomucen, 17, Bruxel
Click here for English

Open Source Publishing est fier de vous inviter à son petit-déjeuner canadien, où vous seront servies leurs dernières aventures dans le monde des Logiciels Libres. Au menu: mise en page animée d’un conte de fée, programmeur chercheur de singes à [...]

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 [...]

Nomade, an Argentinian group of artists using Free Software, just finished a printed publication on intellectual property, plus a detailed tour through the process: http://nomade.liminar.com.ar/wakka.php?wakka=MaBI&v=der
Included: design sketches, illustrations, description of the pre-press process, final pdf’s and a html version. Of course everything Open Source. Very nice!

Mute Magazine develops Open Source software, and has recently installed Ubuntu on all office machines. Now they want to move their lay-out away from QuarkXpress too.
Last week, Simon Worthington and Darron Broad from Mute came over to discuss the project. First of all we will need to make sure their original templates can be migrated [...]

A widely used proprietary color-system such as Pantone, obviously raises questions for Open Source graphic tools. Gregory Pittman writes:
* Obviously, no one, including Pantone, can copyright a color, and especially in these days where the RGB/CMYK color systems are freely usable — ie, you can’t put a claim on RGB color “ef9824″.
* They can copyright [...]

Craig Bradney and Peter Linnell discuss the future of Free and Open Source Software for commercial printing:
Right now, I would say the biggest weakness from an FOSS point of view is there are few good high quality fonts. It is one of those areas which requires tremendous amounts of QA to make them reliable in [...]

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

Lay-out in Scribus
Download low-res PDF
Finished! Sketched and produced a seven page contribution to Open (Dutch bi-monthly on art in public space) + inside cover. Images were prepared in Gimp; pattern assembled in Inkskape and document lay-out in Scribus (v1.3.3.2); all on Ubuntu.

Conditions of production and cultural consumption
After Nicolas gave a brief history of how author rights have developed and how the free software and copyleft movements responded to its increasing restrictive use…

…while trying to be not to grim about the way copyright laws are currently used and abused…

This poster by Act Up (questioning the geneology of [...]

Wednesday September 13, 10:00 – 20:00
Tesla, Klosterstraße 68-70, Berlin
http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=2806
Workshop Organised by Cornelia Sollfrank and Nicolas Malevé
Printing Party by Harrisson & Pierre Huyghbaert

FREEdom and OPENness – anything but marketing and ideology? Sharing, really? Culture from and for the Commons. One day before WOS4, an international group of artists, programmers and theoreticians will meet for a concentrated [...]

Souvenirs / Greetings from the Print Party!

Microsoft has recently announced that their 2007 release of Office will not support the “save-as-PDF”-option anymore. This might be bad news for designers’ favorite file-format. PDF could become rather exotic when Microsoft users decide en masse to “Save-As-XPS” instead.

At this years’ edition of Digitales, we tested out a recipe for producing booklets, using texts with open licenses that are available on line. The recipe was an excuse to discuss the relation between software and design, why it would be interesting for designers/publishers to consider using FLOSS tools and what the problems might [...]

The focus of this recipe is on the last bit: rearranging pages so that you can easily print out nice booklets. For a quick-and-dirty solution you can use Abiword or OpenOffice for the page-lay out part but Scribus is essential when you want to be precise with typography.
The recipe is based on the How-To posted [...]

Production line set up for the scanning, lay-out (in Scribus of course!), printing and binding of The Continuous Present
On May 18-19 The Continuous Present was printed-on-demand at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. This publication was developed in the context of The Tomorrows Book, an ongoing investigation into the possible futures of reading, publishing [...]