After heated debates, intensive collaborative working sessions and many hesitations, OSP feat. Alexandre Leray finally proposed a new identity for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting to the Libre Graphics community.

Since the next meeting will take place in in our home town Brussels, we felt that it was important to at least try to shift the way our favourite tools are represented. We wrote to the Create mailinglist:

Our main design concern was about how to represent digital tools in their diversity, from Desktop Publishing to 3D modeling, from typography to batch processing etc., showing by this means the multiplicity of the projects gathered at the Libre Graphics Meeting. This is the role assigned to the background, a static SVG composition of some of the most significant digital tools from the libre projects. This background, present on all the pages, zooms and pans randomly on each page loading, thanks to a small javascript. This gives to the readers unexpected exploration of the territories of that “map of creative tools”.

Dynamic background in SVG: unexpected explorations of the “map of creative tools”

The logo is a play with the M of Meeting, shifting between 2D and 3D perception; between static and movement. 3 squares for a flag. A flag for a meeting. A flag for a place, and for a space. A typographic flag for an italic M. 3 squares for pixels. 15 degrees rotated squares for vectors. 3 squares of progressive sizes to evoque movement. 3 sizes overlapping for 3D optical effect. 3 windows floating. The typeface used, is OSP-DIN.

Logo proposal: A flag for a Meeting. A flag for a place, and for a space

As the background is very present, we decided to base mainly the website on text. It is set with Dave Crossland’s open typeface Cantarell, available for download at Open Font Library. This humanist sans-serif font was designed for on screen reading therefore it is very legible even on small sizes. This choice was made to promote the Open Font Library, the GPL and Fontforge with which was made the font, but also the new @font-face CSS rules newly (re-)introduced in Firefox 3.5 (among other web browsers). Not to mention that Dave is a very active Create member and a professional type designer.

We picked up the yellow color as a way to keep the foreground legible. The latter is made of two colors, a navy blue and a brown, to differentiate two levels of information. We also decided to “mute” the partners logos by converting them to a single color in order to keep the whole homogeneous.

It’s no easy task 😉 to design for such a divergent mix of developers, free software activists, artists and designers but we’re determined to find a constructive middle ground and keep the energy of our proposal alive.

Watch this thread and give your 2 cents:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/create/2009-September/thread.html#2056
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/create/2009-October/thread.html#2063

Logo proposal: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/documents/LGM2010/logo (please install OSP-DIN)
Website sketch: http://lgm.alexandreleray.com