PREFACE Ce texte a été initialement écrit pour la revue Back Office. Pour des raisons de format, il n’y sera pas publié, mais nous sommes heureux de le partager ici avec vous dans sa version longue. HTML2PRINT SANS SAUCE Depuis sa création en 2006, Open Source Publishing dessine des mises en page et code avec des logiciels […]

What can we learn about our current society by looking at the increasing production of art works that are made in cooperation with their audience? And in reverse, how does the general raise of cooperative activism in the society influence the arts? The art centre BUDA, located in the West Flemish city of Kortrijk, organised a three day festival […]

As part of the yearly Design Festival Une Saison Graphique, and in collaboration with l’École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen, OSP would like to invite you to its exhibition README.OSP! It has been 10 years since the first public OSP blog post, and README.OSP takes the opportunity to reflect on the potential of a […]

Two days together to think about OSP in the future. Discussion + Updating the website + Party.

Up Pen Down – Huppe Plume Tonne is a workshop linking typography and performance. It is a collaboration between OSP and choreographer Adva Zakai, and you are invited to participate! The workshop will take place Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th of October in the Balsamine theatre, Brussels. On the 25th the doors will be open […]

In what might be a some-what surprising move (even to ourselves) OSP has taken up offices in the World Trade Center. Do not hesitate to pass by! Send us a mail, and we will meet you in the lobby! Or write us a letter at: Avenue Roi Albert II / Koning Albert II laan 30, […]

Announcing Up Pen Down — Huppe plume tonne a workshop and preformance during the Quinzaine Numérique 2015: specifics of the workshop are on their way, but for now, here is the introduction text: En 2012, OSP (Open Source Publishing) construit un workshop de plusieurs mois avec des étudiants de l’École Supérieure d’Art et Design de […]

Last February, OSP officially became an asbl/vzw: a Belgian association with no lucrative purposes. We are trying to get more structured and this goes through making precise activity reports. Here is the one for 2014 : OSP2014.pdf.

Relearn is back for 2015! We’re very happy to see the summer school continue and morph into a new being again this year, with a new set of people taking care of the organization. Quick recap: OSP set up the first edition of Relearn in 2013. In 2014, Relearn was a jointed venture with all […]

When you mix travel stories with non profit association elation, within the zero boundary format of a print party, what do you get? We came up with a mix of different things we wanted to share and show, and mixed them in with some more down to earth writing extracted from our Statutes. One article […]

This is an extract from our association statutes. Links at the end of the page. The association OSP has as its main goal to propagate Free and Open Source culture in Brussels and internationally. More specifically, OSP asbl aims to stimulate the social movements of Free Culture and Free Software in the field of graphic […]

We are happy to announce an OSP ASBL/VZW* celebration evening and Print Party. Back from our yearly travel to the Libre Graphics Meeting, full of Toronto stories, and soon to be tattooed with a VAT number, OSP welcomes you in their transit tavern. Join us in cutting, plotting and browsing recent works. Come to celebrate […]

We just finished a great workshop week @HEAR Strasbourg on the topic of printing HTML. Printing HTML is not a new idea, but in the last few years we’ve been compiling sets of tools and scripts to properly use HTML as a base for proper layout. This idea has taken on several flavors over different […]

Ramène ta fraise! We’re currently giving a html2print workshop @HEAR in Strasbourg that we’re punctuating with a conference presentation of OSP’s work tomorrow evening in the main hall @18:00. Come on over, ramène ta fraise! Results of the html2print workshop on their way and in construction, for now know that we’re reactivated automatic frog so […]

Tom Lechner Our description of the first encounter we had with Tom would probably be similar to the one of any of the two hundred people, sitting in the audience of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, back in May 2010.   The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual meeting for users and developers of […]

Since the early days, OSP has changed form over and over, from asking simple questions right through to organizing week-long workshops to share answers its members have found. There have been a fair amount of turning points in the past, and some of the biggest ones have happened over the last few years. The Variable […]

We’re happy to be having the next Print Party in the familiar Balsamine Foyer for the second year in a row! This year as part of a new seasonal program, but also smaller parallel program «Nos Petites Madeleines» and along with the 15 day long Quizaine Numérique we’re going to be presenting Hachures Tourneurs. Following […]

Once again Les Halles are housing the 2014 edition of «Le salon du financement participatif» called Europe Refresh and it looks like it’s going to be a couple of exciting weekends! This year, to maximize the chances of fully funding the projects, the Salon will be set up for a weekend in Brussels then a […]

Medor is not a dog ! It’s a trimestrial, Belgian magazine of inquiries and stories, 128 pages long. Médor contains long-term investigations, reports and portraits focused on Belgium. Médor digs the heart of issues. It inquires and it is persistent. It takes the time needed to be further, beyond appearances. It seeks to understand the […]

étapes magazine issue 220 focused on Co-Working, so we were pleased to be asked for an interview for the Portrait section of the publication. In proper OSP fashion, after an initial set of questions from Caroline Bouige, the interviewer, we answered collaboratively, both to the questions and to each other. You can read the full […]

Good news! Considering how well last years OSP Relearn Summer School went, we’re reiterating and extending the school with all of the people and labs that make up Variable. We’re really exited to be able to make this happen again, especially considering all the extra people that will be joining in this year. Relearn starts on July 6th (Sunday) and […]

This print party was wildly exciting. Thanks again to the collectif SIN and De La Charge gallery. Find the recipe and generic of the event on the README page of the workshop and download the 2 hits interpreted by our voice Ms. Funzie Korocr, ????? ??? Remix 1 and ????? ??? Remix 2

After Metahaven (2008/2009), Åbäke (2009/2010), Paul Elliman (2010/2011) and LUST (2011/2012), OSP are honoured to join the ESAD’s program as invited designers, giving workshops throughout the first semester.

Thanks Femke! Thanks Constant!

? Hello, Sorry to disturb you. We are a group of designers working in Brussels, Belgium with free software and we’ve used for 18 months the Ume fonts for the graphical and typographic identity of a theatre. We are preparing a presentation/performance in which we would love to insert some details about the Ume fonts, […]

       the aftermath of  ? You’re witnessing  the 21-22 June 2012 OSP live layouting session, we’re switching to the iceberg paradigm the post-by-commit way of showing our work. Most of osper’s are here for it. Yeah. Crosswheels on ice. And plenty of server jumps.

La Balsamine program 2012-2013. Freshly printed. Jacket folding and stamping session this week. Season poster coming.

The next Osp Public Meet will take place on Monday the 23rd. For this third edition, we will try to precise our exhibitionist experiment of talking internal affairs in public. Here below are the few code lines of the new version. Thank you Sarah Magnan who was with us the past two weeks! 18h00 ¬ […]

So on my way to the Visual Culture codebase today I happened upon a rabbit hole that was too inviting not to descend into: (Note that all names in this email are new to me as of today). In response to a new LaTeX users questions about ‘best practices’ for laying out a letterhead, Frank […]

How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we bring together canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand in more interesting ways? These are the questions developed at the Libre Graphics Research unit Co-position meeting. The LGRU is a research project developed by […]

This Monday 20th of February Our first public OSP-meet was a success and we are expanding on the formula. Instead of just discussing the work of OSP, we invite you to bring on the table any graphic design project that involves or has been produced with free / libre / open source software. We start […]

Ana and Ricardo, our friends from Manufacturaindependente, have join us at Variable house for a February residency busy with the preparation of the LGRU Co-position research meeting. In the beehive, maybe a pre-workshop about Colorfonts?

Encore une histoire de “et-icien”/”ou-icien” et encore une nouvelle raison de faire de la cuisine dans OSP! Bernard Vaudour -Faguet, “Histoire des cuisinières électriques et des ordinateurs”

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. Lisible sur la plateforme f-u-t-u-r-e.org: f-u-t-u-r-e.org/r/02_OSP_Relearn_FR.md Aussi disponible comme fichier pdf: Relearn Le texte est écrit à […]

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 […]