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 […]

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

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 […]

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!

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.

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 […]

You’re welcome for a series of talks by Dave Crossland

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.

The Open Font Library is preparing a brand new site (an idea of what’s in store: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki) and this sparked off an interesting discussion about terminology. How to name fonts that are made available on the OFL site?

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 […]

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

As a side effect of the BPI/cinéma du réel festival, OSP has been asked to “perform” the program map in full scale in the Centre Georges Pompidou main hall, where the festival occurs. The map is a derivative from the printed one, folded into the brochure. It networks the festival selected movies and the subjective […]

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

Lots of work going on the OSP Studio. Here are few of our recent production: = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Logo for Le Vecteur Cultural space in Charleroi city Button version: This logo that can be adapted in multiform patterns: = = = = […]

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. […]

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.

? 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 […]

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 […]

NotCourier-sans is now available for download: Download NotCourier-sans.ttf here This is it’s license copyright notice under construction: This font is released under an Open Font License. You are invited to use, distribute and modify it. NotCourier-sans was designed by OSP (Ludivine Loiseau) in Wroclaw at the occasion of LGM 2008 and is based on Nimbus […]

This Wednesday, join us for our type workshop in the OPT cultural center in Wroc?aw from 11am to ongeveer 6pm. For those who arrive directly from the airport, you can begin with this path then please print this map, because it seem that it is not easy to find for taxi driver (our journey was […]

Opening tomorrow! Signage for The Pavilion of Provisionary Happiness by OSP. The font will be released under an open license soon. More images: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=7

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

Looking for ways to fund an European project on Free Fonts… OSP participated in the Info Day on cultural grants, organised by the European Commission in Brussels.

OSP is testing Liberation Mono in an invitation for an exhibition in Brussels: (Inkscape, Gimp and Scribus)

Thanks to Red Hat®, a 3 major new sets of fonts under GPL+exception license. Named “Liberation” serif, sans and mono, those types are designed to subset the hegemony of proprietary helvetica, times and monospace courier new because metric compatible. It means distance between letters are the same, lenght of documents won’t change if helvetica is […]

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 […]

Schablonenschrift A – Din1451 – August 1949 Inkscape drawing.

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

A news found on Linuxhelp: Visit any random website and chances are the website expects your machine to have a set of fonts which have become the de-facto standard on the Internet. The fonts being Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New and so on. While it may not be illegal to install these fonts on […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Ellen Lupton’s question: Why would a typeface designer want to give a font away? sparked off a series of comments worth reading. The discussion shows how much typographers struggle with ‘open source’ as an idea. It makes you wonder why Lupton decided to ask ‘to give away a font’ and not ‘to share source’ – […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

http://www.orgdot.com/aliasfonts/ (c) 2001 http://www.orgdot.com: you can copy, use, modify and distribute this code and/or artwork for educational, commercial or recreational use.

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 […]

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 […]

Open Source Font in True Type format. Broodthaers font will appear as Mallarme in the font list. Download here

[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 […]