Libre Graphics Meeting 2013: Day 3

Fonts, fonts, fonts, open hardware and education.

Storified by Juego· Sat, Apr 13 2013 01:33:48

The day started with the Oswald font creator, Vernon Adams, talking about libre fonts and the opportunities it creates for font designers, quoting Johanna Blakley’s “virtues of copying in fashion design”.

Cultura libre y la copia como incentivos en el diseño de moda o fuentes. Vernon Adams en #LGM13 pic.twitter.com/NJhQns2gISMaría G. Perulero

Booksprint was the subject of the next two talks. One for creating a Fontforge user manual in 3 days. The other one to create a libre fonts specimen book in 5 days by Manuel Schmalstieg.

Es el turno de Manuel Schmalstieg con ‘ Designing a Libre font Specimen Book’. #LGM13 pic.twitter.com/6OxQShmXruMaría G. Perulero

Alexei Vanyashin, font designer and teacher, is here to talk about Cyreal type foundry. One of his work was to design the (in-) famous Lobster Cyrillic glyphs.

Alexei Vanyashin presenta ahora ‘It takes a team to make a font’ #LGM13 pic.twitter.com/69tYECGiI9María G. Perulero

Raphael Bastide then talked about his Unified Type Design project that would possibly improve libre font discovering, documentation, sharing and spreading.

How and where to find a font? Unified typeface design proposal by github.com/raphaelbastide #lgm13Melinda Sipos

Even after Werner Lemberg talk about ttfautohint, font hinting retains a lot of its mystery to me. But I would surely use his software if I ever design a font, because it surely does the job, especially for people who don’t understand hinting like me.

Y ahora Werner Lemberg. ‘The development of Tifautohint, a truetype auto-hinter’. #LGM13 pic.twitter.com/P6XJckPuOwMaría G. Perulero

Warranty void if removed! Apertus, open hardware 4k camera project plans to be the tool for directors with ethics.

Will Open Hardware projects raise awareness of slave labor used in creating technology? Freedom does not grow on the backs of others #lgm13Michael Schumacher

Nina Paley rocks the stage with “The land is mine” and asks tough questions on how to do vector animation with free software. Especially because her next movie will be illegal.

This Land is Minepiratefish1

“Copying is an Act of Love”. Nina Paley on #lgm13 stage presenting her new film. pic.twitter.com/BlraVbH7gsNikos Roussos

Melinda coins the best term to describe OSP:

The “caravan” of Open Source Publishing is on stage.Graphic design agency in Brussels exclusively uses #FLOSS. #LGM13 osp.constantvzw.orgMelinda Sipos

After a quick bocadillo, I’ve attended with more than 30 people a 2 hour gathering organized by Aymeric Mansoux called “Towards a network of free culture aware educators in art and design education“. Lots of ideas and experiences about F/LOSS in education have been shared. Like Aymeric said, this meeting was just a “hand shake” and more things should come out of this.

After quickly presenting the uHbench, open source hardware public bench, I was pleased with the the comments received about it.

UhBench #OSHW public bench by @xuv. Neighbors wanted the same -> workshop -> they built their own. #LGM13Melinda Sipos

some interesting legal issues with open sourcing this ‘open hw’ public bench design! xuv.be/uH-bench-open-… #lgm13Máirín

Daniil Vasiliev followed with a presentation of Hotglue and it’s successor, Superglue and its little home (owned) static data server.

Successor of Hotglue is Superglue: deviding data storage and editing interface -> distributed publishing #LGM13Melinda Sipos

Getting closer to the end of the day, it gets harder to concentrate. Too many of them in one day kills my attention. I still saw “This is not a pipe” and “Laidout”, which showed interesting concepts in a state of work-in-progress. I then just came back in the Auditorio to see François’s presentation at the end.Not much tweets or picture to share the end of this long friday. I guess everyone was tired. The performance that closed Medialab Prado was called “Piksels and lines orchestra“. They run modified versions of graphic software that produce music when you manipulate them. It seemed to me this is close to live coding, although, it uses the graphic designers palette instead of the programmer’s palette.

After that, everyone rushed to a disco bar nearby called “Mama was a groupie” (if I translate it right), where the Gimp community was pouring free beer to everyone. I think it’s the first time I get offered a beer by an open source software. Interesting concept. Well, this kicked the “future party” up. People danced until the end of the night.

This is also the reason why this post is published with a bit of delay. And I’m already late for the conferences of the last day.