Drawing instructions; embodying the TURTLE relational drawing language for large scale typography

After Metahaven (2008/2009), Åbäke (2009/2010), Paul Elliman (2010/2011) and LUST (2011/2012), OSP Open Source Publishing are the the fifth collective to join the ESAD’s program as invited designers, giving workshops throughout the first semester.

The intervention of OSP is situated around the notion of stroke, in the sense of path—as opposed and informed by the notion of form. Allowing itself to be explored through the different modalities of drawing, typography and cartography, the stroke is intimately related to the tool by which it is drawn, thus influencing the visual language.

As technical, intellectual and cultural constructions, software embodies specific conceptions of the objects they are designed to manipulate (stroke and form, in this case). The PostScript format, for example, describes letterforms by their contour instead of their skeleton. Yet other, lesser known file formats might take an inverse approach.

The NO-FEATURE foundry, a space around typographical exchange and collaboration for (ex-)teachers and (ex-)students of the ESAD.

By virtue of the availability of the source code and more importantly still by the open discussions around their conceptions (mailing lists, collaboration platforms), free and open source software allows the designer the better grasp the implications of the tools for their process.

A poster made with Roland, a plotter put to test in the workshops

Bibliography

• Fernand Baudin, L’écriture au tableau noir, Retz, 1984
• Walter Crane, Line and Form, 1900 — http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25290/25290-h/25290-h.htm
• Tim Ingold, Une Brève histoire des lignes, Zones Sensibles, 2011
• Vilém Flusser, “Le geste d’écrire”, in Flusser Studies, n°8, Mai 2009 — http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/08/le-geste-d-ecrire.pdf
• Donald Knuth, “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, in Visible Language, issue 16.1, January 1982; traduction “Le concept de métafonte”, in Communication et langages, n°55, 1983, pp. 40-53 — http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/colan_0336-1500_1983_num_55_1_1549
• Donald Knuth, “Lessons learned from MetaFont”, in Visible Language, issue 19.1, December 1985
• Gerrit Noordzij, The Stroke – theory of writing, Hyphen Press, 2006=
• Femke Snelting, “Scenes of Pressures and relief”, 2009 — http://snelting.domainepublic.net/texts/pressure.txt

Source Files :: Photo Gallery

A week of type, open source and procedural thinking. Learning to work with the command line, drawing a collaborative typeface through drawing instructions and writing scripts to modify existing Libre typefaces.

• Source Files: http://osp.constantvzw.org/workshop/morphologic/
• Photo Gallery: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/images/Morphologic-Workshop-Merz-Akademie

Day 1

• Introduction to the work of OSP Open Source Publishing
• Tutorial of command line interfaces.
• Tools: Terminal, Homebrew
• Homebrew is a package manager that allows to easily install command line Unix software. Cygwin is the Windows equivalent, but offers less packages. In Windows we found running Linux in Virtualbox a better option.
• See: http://i.liketightpants.net/and/absolute-beginners-unix-for-art-students-part-1

Day 2

• Procedural drawing. Using the Robofab library, students draw a letter using drawing instructions for an imaginary pen.
• Tools: Robofab, Python
• Python is a programming language known for its clear syntax. Robofab is a programming library that makes it easy to deal with font objects in Python.
• See http://i.liketightpants.net/and/programmatically-manipulating-typefaces

The final font as Morphologic.otf

Day 3

• Design of a procedural transformation of a typeface
• Designing a recipe for a software procedure is more explicit than for a human. You can tell a human to cut of all serifs of a typeface. A software interface will often see a font as just a collection of points, and if you want it to do something with the serifs you will first have to find a way to define to the software what then is a serif.

Day 4

• Implementing a procedural transformation of a typeface
• Tools: Robofab, the GhostScript Fonts
• The Ghostscript Fonts is a set of typefaces created to replace (and mimic) the proprietary typefaces present in the specification of Adobe PostScript (Helvetica, Times, Courier and several others). As such they represent the DNA of desktop publishing. Thus, while none of the fonts are extremely interesting in their own right, they form a great backdrop for showing procedural transformations on typefaces. And because of their free and open source license, you are actually allowed to alter and redistribute them.

Day 5

• Presentation of the transformation on a poster
• Tools: free choice

with John Haltiwanger / OSP

Web Specimen :: Source Files :: Photo Gallery

Even if a digital font is much more easily modified and reinterpreted than its counterpart in lead, most digital fonts are distributed under licences that prohibit modification and redistribution.

Typefaces released under an Open Source license, like the typefaces on the OSP Foundry, the League of Movable Type and also the Google Web Fonts have licenses that enable re-appropriation.

At the occasion of the workshop ‘Write me a Shadow’ we start from a collection of free and open source typefaces. We follow several approaches, through scripting and drawing, to generate new versions of these typefaces, contoured, shadowed, extruded, cut and redrawn. The typefaces are superimposed using Colorfont.js, using JavaScript and @font-face to create multi-coloured typefaces for the web. We use a modified version of this project developed by Manufactura Independente (Ana Carvalho & Ricardo Lafuente).

with Ludivine Loiseau / OSP

The 19th century town house at Rue Gallait 80 is now known as Constant Variable. For three years, it will house an arts lab for free, libre and open source software. Next to the Open Source Publishing studio, there is an open video workshop and an open hardware workshop. The top floor houses a residency.

OSP has created a modular visual identity for Constant Variable. Using stickers with the VARIABLE logo and seperate keyword stickers representing Free, Libre, Open Source, Software and arts.

Flyer

Website

The launch of Variable has coincided with the release of the OSP Font Crickx, used in the identity—based upon the letters from a Schaerbeek sign maker’s shop.

The signage has been created using actual Crickx stock from Publi Fluor, the stock upon which the digital font has been based.

More signage in the pictures of the opening.

OSP has designed the 2012 program for Brussels based alternative radio station, Radio Panik (105.4 FM). The program (‘the grille’) is constructed through what is considered a type crime— horizontally squashing the text to make it fit.

Next to the design of the program, we constructed a web interface that provides a means for the employees of Radio Panik to generate cd covers and posters in the same style.

We debuted our new typeface Reglo on this job.

The image on the front cover are taken from Wikimedia Commons, and are squashed to align to the same grid as the program details on the inside.

Next to the design of the program, we constructed a web interface that provides a means for the employees of Radio Panik to generate cd covers and posters in the same style.

The web interface allows one to browse and choose from the various image categories of Wikimedia Commons, input a text and choose a paper size, after which it will generate a design in a vector file format.

The output is an SVG file which can be further edited in for example Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape:

Collaborators
Seb Sanfillipo
Agency
OSP

Blog Post

To give programming a productive place in your arts and design practice, you need to get to know programming culture, and, ideally, take part in (re)shaping it. To feel comfortable with being a programmer, you might want to change what a programmer is. With queering up I am not referring to homosexuality, but rather to an approach that undermines existing masculine, heteronormative ideals. An historical example would be Glam rock’s appropriation of the traditional ‘œearnest’ masculine rock musician into the polysexual identity mirror palace created by musicians as David Bowie and Freddy Mercury.

Source Files :: Photo Gallery

As part of the Networked Media Sampler course, OSP give a two day workshop at the Piet Zwart Institute, getting up close and personal with the bézier curves at the basis of the graphics software since the 1980ies, and the procedural drawing languages describing these curves (PostScript and friends).

Pierre Marchand’s Literal Draw is the tool these students use to get up and close with the curves. Taking cues from procedurally drawn OSP logo, the students work together to draw a typeface of connected frog shapes.

with OSP / Pierre Marchand, Gijs de Heij, Ludi Loiseau, Stéphanie Villayphiou, Seb Sanfillipo

‘Hypermap is a lab for the remembering, combining and forgetting of (embodied) knowledge.’ For this project by Danslab Schr.fr makes a design installation in the gallery of the CBKU.

During the course of Performance Studies International, a group of dance professionals send messages to a private Facebook group, interpreting the event.

These messages are laid-out by a computer script and sent to a printer that prints them on graphing paper.

I subsequently coordinate the performers in attaching these to the wall: the performers make visual connections based on their understanding of the texts.

With: Diane Elshout, Bruno Listopad, Giulia Mureddu, Ola Maciejewska, Jochem Naafs, Jette Schneider. Production: Danslab, Bit Dansdramaturgie, PSI.

Even though the prospect of collaborative open source type development upsets some type designers, the project has been inspirational for other open font initiatives, like the League of Movable Type, the OSP Foundry and The Open Font Library.

Because Open Baskerville is open source it is free to download, use and modify (on this site the headlines are set in Open Baskerville).

As a design project, Open Baskerville is remarkable because it appropriates software development tools to enable typographic collaboration. The project was initiated by Simon Pascal Klein, based on work by James Puckett. Since then Eric Schrijver has been acting as a project lead, gathering designers and developers around the project and implementing a collaborative workflow. To learn more about how to collaborate, visit the project website.

The technology of collaboration

The font files are in the open UFO format, that is usable in all major font editors. We store the file modifications in a system called Git, that was developed by Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux. With Git, different designers maintain their own ‘fork’ of the typeface, and they can exchange their changes. This distributed approach helps to avoid a design by committee result.

Because Git has initially been developed for software development, its interface can proove inacessible to designers. The code hosting website Github has helped us out tremendously, by implementing previews of the font folder, and a visualisation of the differences inbetween different versions of the typeface.

Download latest Open Baskerville