Appropriation has been a recurring and accepted strategy in defining typography as activity and business. We can pinpoint four cases where appropriation has definitely been key in defining landmarks in the history of type, not only aiding the breaking of technical and creative boundaries but also helping to question legal and moral ones.

We’ll go on to briefly analyse the current situation in typography, focusing on the approach to the subject by corporations, users and designers. The current business model (digital foundries, font files with copyrights) is, as we’ll argue, a remnant of a time where a typeface filled a whole drawer and fails to account for the necessary changes that the information age demands; we’ll conclude with the definition of an essentially contradictory business model that has very strong stands against “font forging” and copyright issues, although it has historically – and now, more than ever – thrived on constant, and often uncredited, appropriation of ideas and designs.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Contribution by De Geuzen in Open magazine about Travail Mobile, a workshop for Digitales. After the Crash Test-post a few month ago, finally pictures of the result! Thanks to Peter Linnell (one of the main Scribus developers), who after I posted about some Postscript troubles to the Scribus mailinglist, came to the rescue on IRC.