Open Source Publishing questions the influence and affordance of digital tools through its practice of (commissioned) graphic design, pedagogy and applied research. They prefer to use exclusively free and open source softwares (F/LOSS). Currently the group is composed of people with backgrounds in graphic design, typography and development. They find excitement in the cross-over between its members respective fields and competences. Legally OSP is structured as a bilingual Belgian non-profit organization (asbl/vzw) and aims to question and find alternatives to the standard graphic design studio model.
OSP welcomes new collaborations. You can reach us at miam@osp.kitchen
Antoine ‒ We are obsessed designers. We are specialists, on many very niche fields. And we try hard to take care of our environment.
Alex ‒ We are working on understanding digital tools for designers and media. For that, we need them to be libre, it's a means, not a goal. How to construct the storytelling of it?
Gijs ‒ The dogma of OSP is an asset. F/LOSS (Free/Libre and Open-Source Software) is an invitation on looking at software. And we have an expertise with it.
Stéphanie: We do applied research, more and more. There is always new stuff, F/LOSS is still and will stay exotic. Our explorations have thickened compare to our start in 2006. We have a mixed practice by teaching.
Sarah ‒ We have a diversity of practices. The awkwardness of it is a way to narrate what we are. Awkwardness comes from the fact that we put the care elsewhere.
Ludi ‒ We are unfolding practices. We need more time to reflect about what we do.
Pierre ‒ Even it it misses the graphic design dimension, maybe we could use the term «digital arte povera», coined by Christophe Alix, director of Le75 art school.
Through its radical practice, Open Source Publishing questions the modes of collaboration between graphic designers and artists, between graphic designers and cultural institutions. In an effort to clarify the frame of the specific collaborations that OSP initiates, the collective produced a collaboration agreement in 2014. Since then, the document has been regulary reviewed. Within Caveat research project, visual illustrations have been inserted into the document and its language has been reshape in an attempt to ease legibility, see https://ecotones.caveat.be/osp.html.
OSP has worked with organisations both large and small, and collaborated with individual artists. They have organised workshops, print parties and talks at many art schools and other venues. Our archives of the period 2006-2010 should be harvested, but starting in 2011 we have more structured traces.
https://luuse.io Antoine is part of Luuse along OSP, based in Brussels, practices graphic and type design, thinks that "forms you use to write your thoughts belong to you and that all technical objects must remain open, even digital fonts", read Simondon and listen to grind core.
Graphic designer, Sarah started to experiment at ERG (Brussels) possible links between graphic design and new media art. From links to links she get curious and interested by collaborative work, sharing matters on web, on print and more widely on archiving matters: which status to gives to archive, how to make it born or reborn, how to share it, show it, confront it. Sarah is one of the founders of the Médor investigation media.
http://stdin.fr/ Stéphanie Vilayphiou is a graphic designer and sometimes developer. She is interested in how the persons who conceive a digital tool influences the way we use it. She teaches at erg art school courses on experimenting free software. Next to OSP activity, she starts to research textile design in relation to mathematics and programming.
http://de-heij.com/ Gijs de Heij is a graphic designer and programmer. Next to his activities within OSP he is a member of the research group Algolit where he researches the potential of algorithmic literature. He lives and works in Brussels with a particular interest in pen plotters.
http://stdin.fr/ Graphic and media designer who combines a visual and programmatic approach to design. Alexandre is interested in the web as a reading/writing space, software studies and commons. He has edited a collection of documents on the relationship between tools, practice and free culture in graphic design. Alexandre is one of the founders of the Médor investigation media, and teaches at the septante-cinq art school.
http://www.ludi.be/ Formed at the Ecole Estienne (Paris), Ludi relearned everything in Brussels. She immersed herself in the centre for graphical delicacies Speculoos and met the OSP group aboard a van on route to Poland in 2008. Ludi questions the contemporary role of typography and her practice is reflected in her courses at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique (ERG), where she is a lecturer in typography and free software. She is one of the founders of Médor project, a quarterly Belgian investigation and storytelling magazine.
http://www.speculoos.com Exploring several practices around graphic design, he currently drives the studio Speculoos. Pierre is interested in using free sofware to re-learn to work in other ways and collaboratively on cartography, type design, web interface, schematic illustration, book design and teaching these practices. Along participating in OSP, he is co-founder of Médor, teacher in type media at La Cambre art school, develops collaborative and subjective mapping with Atelier cartographique and others Brussels urban projects.
(In order of joining) - Femke Snelting - Harrisson - Nicolas Malevé - Yi Jiang - Ivan Monroy López - Pierre Marchand - Seb Sanfilipo - John Haltiwanger - Eric Schrijver - Colm O'Neill
We have also other members who are following us closely or from a certain distance.
We are late on the ball but we are digging into our archives to build the most complete list of interns as possible! More soon here. To apply for internship, send us a mail on miam at osp.kitchen and we will be back to you after one of our meetings.
The more OSP accumulates work, the more cross sections appear among the projects. A good part of these interesections end up emerging as themes of their own. We've made the decision to stimulate OSP's research functions by following some of these more specific themes. They are the most interesting and exiting to us. We want to drive these forwards, we're making them into their own (research) projects. * - Html2print - Publishing platforms - Stroke typography - Collaboration and association (meta)
After calling itself a caravan since its start in 2006, from 2015 on OSP is organised as a bilingual (FR-NL) belgian association.
We are formaly organised around four documents that are available and versioned on https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/osp/osp.meta.association - our legal statutes - our recipe of internal order - our registry of members - our collaboration agreement This collaboration agreement has been published as part of our ecotones of collaboration research in the frame of the Caveat research.
We encourage the reuse and modification of this structure and documents for any collective that want to setup a design non-profit association (see just below).
If not stated in another way, our works and texts are published under the dual and compatible Free Art License version 1.3 and Attribution ShareAlike Creative Commons BY-SA. If those licenses are quite useful to begin to clarify relational contracts between practionneers, we do not see them as full solutions and we are quite interested on re-imagining copyleft licences.
Founded in 2006 in the context of Brussels art organisation Constant, OSP started with the commitment to use only Free or Open Source Software.
At the start of its activity, OSP has blogged a lot and collected tons of pictures. We follow quite every edition of the Libre Graphic Meeting, participate actively to the Libre Graphic Research Unit and it's "Consider your tools" reader and initiate the Relearn school (summer collective learning experimement). We start using Git and publish work, fonts and tools using our home-made Visual culture software. We've got a ten-years exhibition at Le Havre ESADHAR art school, blog less (even if it is not a statement), we micro-blog a bit. We are part of the Caveat research project.
During the years and in addition of Belgium, OSP has made workshops, print parties and conferences in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Canada, UK, Poland, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Vietnam, South Korea, Haïti, Brasil, Denmark.
Les Nains (.odt), a song by Marie Dubas (1937), important inspiration when we were on the road to LGM 2008 in Wrocław