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

“À l’extérieur de cette boîte si tranquille, de bouillonnantes transformations s’opèrent également!” — From hand movement to vector curves to hand movement

“I think it is impossible to copyright empty space” (Pierre H quotes Pierre M) We received different responses to our open letter to Monotype that we posted here and on Typophile. Actually, we did get a reply from MonoType’s lawyer, acknowledging our letter, and asking us to identify ourselves as a legal body. We responded […]

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

Brussels, April 15 @ 3:45 pm — stay tuned for full story in 2 weeks

Spring cleaning with a long awaited operation : the release of our OSP DIN. Spring listing our current favorite fonts, in use for projects or planned to be used : Bentham Copse OSP Din Engshrift Droid Serif and Sans Sorts Mill Goudy Inconsolata Libertine Latin Modern Molengo NotCourierSans PT Serif Puritan Quicksand Ume Univers-Else Vollkorn […]

For the second day of the Royal College of Art workshop we paid homage to Eric Gill’s typographic work. What better place than London to revisit his classic Gill Sans. We worked from several different sources and ended up creating three very unique versions of Gill Sans. The first version was generated by vectorizing a […]

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.

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.

Recipe for teaching Unicode poetry to students of all ages:1 Print out listings of the following Unicode blocks: Dingbats (2700–27BF), Miscellaneous Symbols (2600–26FF) and eventually Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (2B00–2BFF). It is important you include the descriptions in the language of your choice. Below are German, English and French sample files. Contextualize the Dictée by […]

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 […]

Imagine1 a paragraph in Scribus. The first word consists of three vowels and a consonant. The Scribus text-engine receives this cluster of characters as a first input. Now the shaper will start to work; it has to decide what features need to be applied to the cluster. Do characters need to be re-ordered? Do ligatures […]

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

Following a trackback, Alexandre discovered the work of Lafkon studio a few days ago. Than, through Antonio Roberts’ comment on this same post, I find out about his work with animated fontfiles. Antonio writes: “Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats […]

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.

7 OSP funky geeky sheeps players inTypogravieh lebt’s trailer. Vielen Dank Martin & the typovieh-team. Our Bauhaus typo symposium was more than leben.

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 […]

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

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.

O S P Noisettes – Black – Melk

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 […]

1. Unlimited Use License Judging from the mysql errors flying around, the Open Records Generator software developed by David Reinfurt, is not actively maintained at the moment. Still, this GPL licensed software presents an interesting mix of buyers and users: “The buyer receives full rights to modify and reuse the software for future applications” (found […]

Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN – Das Ist Norm – Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to […]

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

“With the written word an absolute fundamental component of daily communication, typography and fonts are vital to providing aesthetic harmony and legibility to our textual works. There are thousands of fonts available, of which only a small number are useful or any good for setting vast quantities of text, and of which an even smaller […]

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 […]

We’re currently working on a poster for the support comittees for the nine people accused of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity”. They were arrested the 11th of november 2008, in France, and 2 of them are still in jail. They and others are the victims of a witch-hunt in which the word […]

The Libertinage font set we developed for FLOSS+Art book is available on the Open Font Library for several days. We built Libertinage by copying and pasting parts of Linux Libertine glyphs or simply by all-turning glyphs. There are 27 variations, one for each latin letter in the alphabet + the ‘Full’ version, containing all modifications. […]

The hard and well documented work of a Dutch Belgian Python artist and designer – Stani – to produce a coin devoted to Dutch contemporary architecture, using only floss. The stroke font he design for it is simply beautiful (currently no info on availability). Via Dave‘s understanding blog.

The FLOSS+Art book (that we proudly were commissioned to design 🙂 ) will be out this thursday at Mute Magazine HQ! Book preview, panel discussion and software party! Don’t miss the opportunity to also check out the Libertinage font set we developed for this book: 26 variations of the Linux Libertine font! Which will be […]

Excellent Brussels based graphic design studio collerettecocofilllsd just released a book called “Le Sale Boulot”, from german Franco-Chilean artist Vladimir Cruells. Main font used is NotCourier we designed. We’re proud! http://collerettecocofilllsd.com/blogblog/

L’ATypI 08 est en route à St Petersburg. Denis Moyogo Jacquerye, co-leader du projet DejaVu y a présenté ce matin le projet sur lequel il travaille actuellement. C’est l’occasion pour nous de publier une interview OSP de Denis, rencontré en mai dernier aux Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 de Wroc?aw.

A new release of the NotCourier-sans is now available here, with its bold. The OSP frog, the IJ, ij, numero and trademark ligatures are now encoded in the discretionary ligatures.

As you might have gathered from Thomas Phinney’s latest comment on our post The Status of Utopia, Adobe will not re-release Utopia under an Open Font License. It doesn’t mean though the font cannot be studied, copied, modified and distributed: “Although changing the license would make it easier for folks who find licenses confusing and […]

On October 11, 2006 Adobe granted members of the Tex User Group the right to use, modify and distribute the Utopia typeface: Adobe Systems Incorporated (“Adobe”) hereby grants to the TeX Users Group and its members a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to the typeface software for the Utopia Regular, Utopia Italic, Utopia Bold and Utopia […]

In a déjà old interview (2000) by Advogato, Donald Knuth (TeX and Metafont author) answers in his sometimes-very-short sometimes-generous style. In the middle of these all interesting things, a few exchanges about relations between mathematics, fonts, free and money. Enough close to some parts of talks at Wroclaw, like the Dave Crossland’s one, and some […]

image/index.php?level=album&id=18 David Bargenda’s photos: http://flickr.com/photos/opt-art/tags/opensourcepublishing/ With a group of 20 courageous participants and the help of open type activists Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger we are using Inkscape, Gimp and FontForge to produce a typeface in a day. We have named it W Drog? (On Our Way, En Route in Polish) and it […]

On our way from Berlin to Wroclaw, OSP managed to photograph almost every letter in the Polish roadsignage alphabet. We are preparing for the Local Universal workshop and still looking for F, Q, X and H (capital + lower case). If you happen to come across one, please send us a picture?

Pandora’s Standardised Box Kommando OSP Pierre and Harrisson spent a few days this February in Berlin to explore the DIN project further. http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/index.php?level=album&id=10

We nearly missed our train back to Brussels while meeting Dave Crossland. At the station we talked about the history of font editing software, about the ‘free font movement’ and everything that could become possible once fonts and font editing software are free. We were also excited about how (and why!) Dave wants to open […]

2 day workshop Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem (20 + 21 November, 2007) What permutations between typeface, typesetting and text can you imagine? How to design through scripting and can you read differently with computer manipulations? Full brief:

OSP visits Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem (The Netherlands) to discuss a two-day workshop on Free Fonts with Anniek Brattinga and Karel Martens. http://www.werkplaatstypografie.org

One of our Rotterdam reporters made us notice Inconsolata, a monospaced font designed by Ghostscript maintainer Raph Levien. Levien offers an OTF version, plus ‘raw’ fontforge files on his webpage. First and foremost, Inconsolata is a humanist sans design. I strove for the clarity and clean lines of Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir (the lowercase “a”, in […]

Interview with George Williams, Fontforge developer (…) I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my mind — and in some sense I find the user interface beautiful. I’m not sure that anyone else in the world does, because it’s what I want, but I think it’s beautiful. (George Williams, May 2007) For those […]

Schablonenschrift A – Din1451 – August 1949 Inkscape drawing.

Conversation avec Pierre-Luc Auclair (Déjàvu) et Nicolas Spalinger (OFL) SIL_deja_vu.mp3 (27 mn – 25 Mb) Extrait d’une conversation avec Pierre Luc Auclair, graphiste et collaborateur dans le projet de police Déjà vu, et Nicolas Spalinger, bénévole de la SIL, équipe fontes libres Debian et Ubuntu, OFLB. En français dans le texte, avec quelques questions posées […]

If we check the font infos of Liberation font, on Fontforge, for example, here is what we find:

Interview (unedited files) with George Williams, developer of FontForge, the open source font editing tool. Conversation about Shakespeare, Unicode, the pleasure of making beautiful things and pottery. Enjoy! Listen to the recording : GW_dl1.mp3 [8.1 mb] and GW_dl2.mp3 [16.6 mb] … or read the transcription: “I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my […]

DEbian Font MAnager a.k.a. dfontmgr (available through the Synaptic Package Manager) is helpful when you want to register and unregister fonts on a Debian / Ubuntu system. After installation you can start the manager, which is a GUI for the Defoma package, from the command line. Type sudo dfontmgr (you need to be root to […]

“FE-Schrift or f?lschungserschwerende Schrift (falsification-hindering script) has been the only typeface used on new vehicle registration plates in Germany since November, 2000. It was designed for the German government in the late 1970s in the light of Red Army Fraction terrorist activities, when it was discovered that with the then standard font for vehicle registration […]

The Open Font Library (OFL.o) needs a logo to help identify their project. They want the community to help create this logo and three judges from the OFL.o will select the winning logo which they will use in all of their branding. Logos need to be submitted in .svg before March 14, 2007 at 11:59 […]

A little note on Appropriation and Type text. Gutemberg printed the first book with movable type in 1455. Maybe copyright wasn’t existing at the time, but there was, and there is still, a fight for the first inventor of the printer machine in Europe. Castaldi is alleged to have created movable type in 1442 (inspired […]

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.

Conversation with Ricardo Lafuente Ricardo Lafuente looks at the way typography, (open source) tools and design economies feed off and into each other. In a few weeks he will publish his text here for you to download. In the mean time, read a few of the ideas we exchanged by e-mail. Comments are of course […]

What does it mean, when a typeface is released in the public domain? What are the legal issues surrounding typography? How can a font be generated collaboratively, using open source software? What does it mean, an open standard and how can such a standard fit different contexts? To get our hands into these and many […]

Due to my recent task of teaching typography, I was looking around for courses and experiences in that domain. This drove me to Ellen Lupton’s website, teacher at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA): www.designwritingresearch.org. There, in an impressive generosity, you can consult her current syllabi and exercices of hight quality courses. She’s is also […]

Interview with Harrisson One of the co-conspirators in this open source adventure is a Brussels graphiste going under the name Harrisson. His interest in open source software flows with the culture of exchange that keeps the off centre music scene alive, as well as with the humanist tradition persistingly present in contemporary typography. Harrissons’ visual […]

Kaffeeschrift was developed by Jan Gerner from Dresden for use in menus etc., hence the monospaced figures. It works well for titles and headers, but was not designed for longer texts (though it holds out surprisingly well) Download and try out here: http://www.yanone.de/typedesign/kaffeesatz/ Tagesschrift is scanned and vectoralized handwriting; very nice atmosphere and a more […]

For those who read German, type designer and -critic Gerrit van Aaken published quite a few well-researched essays on familiar open source typefaces such as Gentium and Vera plus a few surprises such as Kaffeesatz and Union (not under an open licence, but distributed by the Danish government for use in documents relating to Danish […]

Two projects to submit fonts to, or find others to work with: Typeforge http://www.typeforge.net The Typeforge project was initiated by Portuguese type designer Pedro Amado, to create a platform for “open source collaborative type design”. You are encouraged to share sketches, notes and ideas and work on collective projects. Good Fontforge tips + tricks too! […]

Discovering that there are so little free fonts* available, keeps surprising us. But did you know that even the logo for Debian, the version of Linux that amongst others Ubuntu is based on, was done in a proprietary font (Poppl Laudatio Condensed)? * There is a lot of Freeware around, but hardly any fonts explicitly […]

Invalidity Division, sounds like science-fiction, doesn’t it? Registered community design is not bad either. Time to start a jargon file… […]this time the dispute is over fonts; specifically Segoe, one of the typefaces Microsoft wants to use in Vista (the new Windows, “bringing clarity to your world”). Microsoft filed its “registered community design” for the […]

http://decodeunicode.org Is an independent online-platform for digital type culture, initiated by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has the objectives of creating a basis for fundamental typographic research and facilitating a textual approach to […]

From WORDS MADE FLESH Code, Culture, Imagination by Florian Cramer (p22) The idea that beauty materializes in numerical proportions according to mathematical laws continues to be popular in scientific and engineering cultures, too. Since the early 1970s, Donald Knuth, widely considered the founder of computer science as an independent academic discipline, published his textbooks under […]

http://www.dustismo.com/ Domestic Manners, by Dustin Norlander. “This font is basically my handwritting. Why anyone would want to use my crappy handwritting for anything, I can’t say. It would be a good way to forge a note from me I guess. Anyway, use it for whatever you want, its released under the GPL so change it […]

The “user-friendly” distribution Ubuntu is distributing its font under the LGPL. I have not heard the same from other distributions. It seems that Redhat or Novell do not want to share their corporate identity with the rest of us. Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte(a company that issues security certificates) to become […]

The open source font Gentium and The SIL Open Font License are both developed and distributed by S.I.L., also known as The Summer Institute for Linguistics, apparently a subsidiary of the Wicliffe Bible Translators. S.I.L. has developed large-scale ethno-linguistic research projects such as http://www.ethnologue.org, an attempt to map all indigenous languages of the world. The […]

[check The politics of typography before applying SIL-OFL] The SIL-OFL is a free license specifically developed for (multi-lingual) fonts. These are the four freedoms guaranteed through the Open Font License (similar to other Free licenses): * Use: the freedom to use font software for any purpose. (freedom 0) * Study and adaptation: the freedom to […]

Most amazing font so far, the Alphabetum font, for ancient languages. It is now possible to compose text with languages that disappeared 5000 years ago. I have to say all my respect for such a nice and usefull work! Thanks from university researchers that had to redraw all archeologic inscriptions found on sites. Now those […]

The Libertine family font contains around 1500 “western” caracters among which cyrillic, greek, turkish and so on. The font looks classical, between Baskerville and Caslon style. The general impression is a contemporary looking 19th century font. Hints are good looking above 8 points, and is comfortable on screen. Good typography seems to be possible using […]

Instead of using the usual The Quick Brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog, this rather absurd text is set as default in Scribus Font Preview: I wonder who decided to use this particular sentence, and why? Alternative pangrams to choose from: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/pangrams.htm

[If you consider using Gentium, check The politics of typography] “Gentium was driven by the need for a free, attractive, legible, high-quality font for extended Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) use. Nothing else was available that was suitable for publishing use, so I decided to give it a try.” (from: interview with Victor Gaultney, designer […]

To my surprise Bitstream Charter, one of the few usable Open Source fonts around I know of, is currently published on myfonts.com with the following licence: http://www.myfonts.com/viewlicense?id=315 Florian Cramer explains what is really going on: “That’s true, but the license change refers to a newer version of Bitstream Charter. A copyright owner of a work […]