The Past

My first ever libre software gettogether was GIMPCon in 2000. The location at the CCC gave it the proper underground vibe. That gathering later became what is now Libre Graphics Meeting when the GIMP and Scribus folks thought there’s some possible synergy to benefit from.

The future

It may sound like a little blasphemy for a GNOME person to say LGM is my favorite conference. I dig GUADEC for its mix of developer and user oriented talks and workshops, but at LGM this synergy seems to be working even better. There’s probably a trend towards attracting more designers than engineers, and I don’t know of a tech conference where there’s pretty much 50:50 gender mix (perhaps in Madrid there were more women than men even).

I want more conferences or gettogethers like this. Feedback from an animator struggling to finish a task is million times more valuable than online polls asking for a feature that exists in other tools. Small community projects struggle greatly with focus and motivation. These user<>developer sessions should not mean folding every single suggestion into Inkscape feature and SVG spec, but seeing tools used is the best we have for user testing.

There were some humorous mailing list like moments too (I hope video archives will be posted, the sessions were recorded). We had a nice example of miscommunication between Boudewijn and Mitch during the GIMP Q&A, but there is room to turn that “but printing spot colors is way more expensive than CMYK, stop ignoring your users” to “it’s the actual workflow, retaining control over individual channels during the process, that makes CMYK a subset of stop color process, the output/print process remains the same.” when talking off a mailing list. People sometimes need to talk face to face to turn those faster horses into cars. I have lost all faith in non-technical or controversial topics ever resolved on a mailing list.

Workshops

I also really enjoyed the “get your hands dirty” sessions such as David Revoy‘s Krita speedpaint workshop that are the carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick for potential new designers giving libre graphic toolchain a go. Seeing amazing art created with our tools is an amazing motivator that allows to overcome some bumps on the way and actually find strength to find unfamiliar solutions or actually bite the lip and start the dialog with the developers (it’s harder than you think). I don’t think my painting skills will improve any time soon, but the workshop did expose a significant omission from the Wacom settings for non-screen tablet users. It felt the Krita developers are on a good course working closely with David to shape the tool and getting amazing promotion and an actual product in return, in a similar way the open movie projects dramatically improved the quality of Blender.

Type

A significant number of talks related to type. Ben Martin and Dave Crossland presented the collaboration features of the new Font Forge. This sounded really intriguing for me, because a lot of the design process is tedious and horrible and things like metrics are a torture that I found much more bearable when we did it with Patrys the other day.

Ana and Ricardo made me feel guilty about never finishing or publishing some of my fonts, because I felt they are too raw but then never gotten to finish them. They mentioned their new foundry and some utilities like the autospacer, giving you a template workflow rather than starting from the dangerous and feared blank slate.

If you ever needed some hand holding for designing your own type, Dave pointed out an extremely nice guide to me.

Getting Started

I gave a short talk on the work we did on Getting Started, but in an expected way was dragged away before I could show some guts of the project. As there’s been interest to see behind the scenes more, I’ll try to blow the dust off the design team youtube channel and do a screencast.

LGM Rocks

I really had a blast seeing everyone again, and came back with a list of things to do and also the energy to do so. Big thanks to the organizers and in particular the GIMP folks for their continuous support of the event.

Allan has done a great job giving an overview of what we’ve been focusing on recently among the design team. This still leaves some room for me to give a peek on some of the details of what’s coming.

One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.

Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.

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As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.

First and foremost I want to thank J5 for organizing this year’s event. Lacking any sort of organizational talent (have hard time organizing my own day), I appreciate the effort one has to put into making an event like the Summit happen. In addition it has been great to see the sponsor support for an important event like this, Collabora in particular (for the best kind of sponsorship .

It’s always a bit amazing to walk the premises of MIT with a slightly unfair feeling of belonging there. The new media lab building is like time travelling to the future. Including the fear of robots attacking me in the hallways.

My private agenda has been quite successfully met. I have found a partner in crime for the execution of the visual theme for GNOME3 in Matthias Clasen, who has fiercely hacked at the most important bits of the widget theme to play well with the window decorations. And while it may sound like a bit of a setback to continue on “dead end street” of theme engines, we are actually going to see the work of Carlos Garnacho land and the final theme being executed solely CSS style, by designers rather than engineers. While Matthias has exposed some of the things I’d like to draw in gtkrc through the clearlooks engine, there is still things that aren’t yet achievable (such as drawing gradients for all the widget states rather than one). Also worth noting is that we’re standing on the shoulders of Benjamin Berg, Hylke Bons, Lapo Calamandrei and Thomas Wood here.

Forgive the lack of hinting on the font

You may have heard we’ve gotten the amazing Dave Crossland aboard and work on getting Cantarell ready to be used as a default screen font on GNOME3. It has been my pet screen font for quite a while despite some rough edges as it’s a typeface with the right pedigree (passionate designer understanding the collaborative free software culture rather than a commissioned work). I’m happy to have it be part of the GNOME3 identity.

System Settings work has also moved forward despite (or maybe due to) the lack of my contributions.

In the Gnome Shell land, Florian’s relayout branch is getting ready to land. Florian was quicker implementing the newest iterations than I was able to produce comps for them. It was fun to see an actual demo of something I planned to introduce.

The summit has successfully injected more enthusiasm for GNOME3. I hope the end result will show the amount of love that went into making it happen. We’re getting there!

• Some photos from the Summit

One of the greatest things about openSUSE is happening again this week. Hackweek time seems to also be the only time I have something worthwhile to put on my blog.

I don’t have a very focused plan for this year, but I’d like to investigate the following:

• Stencil icon workflow.

  I’d like to have a single SVG canvas with all my icons and generate an SVG-only icon theme. Ted Gould showed me his nifty script at GCDS that used Inkscape‘s verbs to ‘chop up’ an SVG into individual SVG files, so that part I already know is feasible.

  The untouched ground is importing those SVGs into a FontForge project file to generate a font out of the theme as well.

• CSS gtk+ theme. Robert Staudinger has been working on a gtk+ theme engine that allows a theme creator to use CSS-like language to draw stuff (as opposed to talking to a developer to draw stuff). The project has been on my radar forever and I’ve never really sat down and gotten my hands dirty. Must fix!

Wish me luck!

Oh no! This is one of those “Oops, I didn’t update this blog for ages” posts. Hopefully I’m not on the same path as my good old friend Tuomas. I’m blaming gwibber for making it so easy to nanoblog.

So what have I been up to lately? I’ve wandered back into font design land with Fifth Leg. Fixed things up a bit and generated & cleaned up a normal weight. Quite a bit of work went into it. So much that I even bravely released v 0.3. It goes well with the window decorations of Sonar, the upcoming openSUSE 11.2 theme. In the meantime I’m working on getting 0.4 out which will have some of the common kernings sorted out, improved ‘g’ and a few latin ligatures. I also dropped having old style numerals as default.

After reading the hilarious blog post by Mark Pilgrim I LOLed. But it also inspired me to start on a humanistic sans serif I’ll probably end up calling Mimicus. Currently it’s called RaveIn due to the type it’s been most inspired by.

The newly refurbished SUSE Studio website is using a condensed width of RaveIn. We’re using Cufon to render the type, but probably should support @font-face too. Hats off to Garrett for making it happen. Stay tuned for the initial font release later this year.

As you can see I haven’t been doing much icon design lately, but luckily the amazing Lapo Calamandrei has been doing great work on gnome-icon-theme in the meantime.

Again, apologies to my readers for having this blog rot a bit.

I screwed up with the proportions and the font is way to strong, but I’m liking the process. You can check out the progress in opensuse-art SVN.

I may be taking on something bigger than I can ever finish in a month and hardly in a hackweek, but it is both fun unknown territory and something that is needed badly.

openSUSE uses a rather spiffy Cholla header font by Sibylle Hagmann. The problem is it isn’t a Free nor free font^*, making it hard for the community to produce openSUSE branded material. So you guessed it, I’d like to design an original type to replace it. Apart from Lingdings (bullets font for OpenOffice Impress) I’ve never done this. Partly because the font designer and even type setting community is very pedantic, deeply following a strict set of rules. Good fonts come from a lot of experience. So be warned, this is pure amateurism, a font designed by a non-type-designer.

To help me stay focused, I’ve come up with these attributes I’d like the font to have.

• Simplistic, technical sans serif.
• Heavy. Rounded.
• Will not do normal weight, this is a headline font. ‘Close’ to Cholla Wide Bold.
• Only basic latin glyph coverage for now (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
• Low contrast.
• Open Font License.
• I don’t aim to kern the font properly this week.

Thanks Garrett for suggesting the name.

Not commonly useful font, but what a name. There’s an amazing number of slick curved typefaces on the tubes.