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/

I’m looking forward to the stories that may be unfolding these days here at SVG Open. Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of “Standards and their Stories”, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. Among other things, this introductory chapter makes a point for the invisibility and pervasiveness of standards 🙂 standards are […]

This interview may be a good read. It deals with some aspects of the “current state” (June 2010) of SVG implementations. It’s got a really sweet format. It’s a two-sided interview, meaning that Doug Scheppers and Patrick Dengler interview each other. It’s not often that I come across interviews that are interleaved: I asked Patrick […]

Yesterday Constant met with Evan Roth to discuss gestures and standards, confessions and F/LOSS, archiving and collaboration. More soon.

3 days, 327 kilometers, 6 liters of Cube Cola Libre and 54 commits later … Please meet NANCY (a new OSP-software project), download the Dingbat Liberation font (DLFo) and much more at: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/nancy Re-thinking Miscellaneous Symbols: Flêche grasse à pointe arondie vers la droite?

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.

Poster and flyer designed and produced in OpenOffice This week and next, colleague and friend An Mertens (a.k.a. Ana Foor) works out of the Elsene local library Sans Souci. She’ll be listening to your account of meeting a loved one for the first time, those habits that keep your relationship alive or which imaginary place […]

Friday December 11 Location: CASCO, Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht (NL) ? ? ❀ ☺ ? ? ☺ ? ❉ Next week, OSP is happy to re-play Dingbat kitchen with students from the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design. “Dingbats have sneaked into most computers nowadays. They’re as much a part of the […]

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 […]

Dans le cadre du festival “Imaginary Property”, OSP vous invite au Novale jeudi 28 mai 2009 à 19 h. Au programme : le jaune interdit et le rouge bientôt libre, un décodage de morceaux de vie montréalais au LGM 2009, une projection vers des formats inconnus et un aperçu de montage vidéo en mode texte […]

Chris Lilley writes: “W3C is collecting ideas for work related to downloadable fonts on the Web. This email summarizes the current situation, and asks for feedback on a draft charter for a future W3C Font working group or interest group. Please send feedback on the charter to the publicly archived mailing list www-style@w3.org.” Read his […]

A conversation with Chris Lilley Almost a year ago at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008, OSP sat down with Chris Lilley on a small patch of grass in front of the Technical University in Wroclaw, Poland. Warmed up by the early May sun, we talked about the way standards are made, how ‘specs’ influence the […]

Under the ambitious title ‘Jeffrey Zeldman Discusses the Future of Open Source‘ (filed under: ‘The Internet’), the CSS guru compares the use of Open Source Content Management Systems to what webstandards did for the web. Looking forward to hear more… and will he mention SVG? Excerpt from a longer interview, soon available here too: http://bigthink.com/ideas/jeff-zeldman-discusses-the-future-of-open-source […]

the workshop’s first publication is ready. every participant has created a fictional petites annonces for it. some pictures of making, collating and distributing. we’re also on irc at #crying_room on irc.freenode.org 🙂 http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=26

on the first day of our workshop at bordeaux, we decided to collectively re-enact an esther ferrer performance. this is a youtube that gives an idea of her movements. with this as starting point, we drew our own paths in the capc…

View Larger Map OSP is preparing for a long drive: Pierre, Yi, Ivan and Femke leave Brussels Tuesday morning to be later joined by another Pierre (our special guest), Harrisson and Ludivine (now in Paris producing a tape/vinyl version of their worldmap for Cinéma du Réel), in Bordeaux. There we’ll meet an interdisciplinary team of […]

5 to 7 March, Bordeaux We’re preparing a journey to Bordeaux, France where OSP will contribute to the conference Edit: Norms, formats and supports with a workshop and a lecture. From the conference description: “Signs and pictograms which organize the flow of movement in cities and towns according to graphic “pie charts” and other diagrams, […]

(a postcard from Vienna) Wishing you (OpenOffice, Ubuntu, Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Debian, Scribus, Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, Open Clip Art, DejaVu project, Open Font Library or any other F/LOSS or Open Content project) were here, at the European Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference …

Ever considered applying as researcher for the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (NL)? Extrastatecraft, a project led by Keller Easterling asks interesting questions about the relation between protocol and practice. The JvE offers great facilities (including financial support) for extra-academic research and with the appointment of Florian Schneider as ‘advising researcher’, the design department […]

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

In the summer of 1997, the NLNet Foundation sold its commercialized internet provision activities to UUNET (the internet subsidiary of WorldCom). This created a fund from which the foundation now supports activities that provide network technology to the community and keep outcomes in the “public domain”. NLnet has picked Identity, Privacy & Presence and Open […]

This weekend the annual meeting of Free and Open Source Developers (FOSDEM) takes place in Brussels. As usual, the ULB fills up with developers from all over Europe, discussing large scale projects such as Gnome desktop, Mozilla, Xorg and PHP. Unfortunately none of the talks addressed our usual working tools (we’ll see more of that […]

A late announcement for an ultra useful tool: Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov have released UniConvertor, a universal vector graphics translator. It uses the sK1 engine to convert one format into another. With UniConvertor you can now convert files from: CorelDRAW ver.7-X3 (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX), Adobe Illustrator up to v. 9 (AI postscript based), Postscript (PS), Encapsulated […]

The Linux Foundation OpenPrinting work group, organises a get-together 24-27 September in Montreal. http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/SummitMontreal As stated on their site, the printing activities of the Linux Foundation revolve around a few focal points: For printer manufacturers, we want to make it easier to produce drivers that work across distributions and to get those drivers in the […]

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 […]

“Neurath’s pictograms owe much to the Modernist belief that reality may be modified by being codified – standardised, easy-to-grasp templates as a revolution in human affairs. But the templates themselves, or the code, may end up in their turn aestheticised, reified, in need of a further round of de-cryption, a paradigm common also to failed […]

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

“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 […]

As we already mentioned in this blog, Adobe owns many of the (proprietary) tools used by designers nowadays: Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and after having acquired Macromedia, it also owns Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, etc. Monopoly rhymes with monoculture. However, Adobe has not always been the enemy of free formats. A recent example being the viewer for […]

Stroom Den Haag started their year long project After Neurath with a public symposium. After Neurath looked/looks at the relevance of 1930’s philosopher and information activist Otto Neurath, and as you can imagine various familiar issues came up. More information about Otto Neurath: http://www.stroom.nl/webdossiers/webdossier.php?wd_id=3530772 The project is curated by Steve Rushton. Speakers: Frank Hartmann, Robin […]

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 […]

James Love just posted this interesting report on Nettime: When standards are political — ODF (the Open Document Format) Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted by TACD at Harvard’s Berkman Center about a very important issue — one that is both highly technical and political at the same time — the battle over the Open […]