Title: please computer | make me design
Date: 2010-06-11 15:30
Author: OSP
Category: Education
Tags: Command Line, Design philosopy, Scripting, Workshops + teaching
Slug: posters-please-computer-make-me-design
Status: published

LG-school — the LGM appetizer — has been the occasion for us (Ivan,
Ludi, Steph and Alex) to give a second workshop on fun command-line
poster generation. This workshop was intended to introduce graphic
designers to a completely different paradigm (the command-line) than the
one they are usually used to (the graphical user interface, or even
processing and other drawbots) and see how pieces of design can be
produced by a set of commands and filters chained together. Using basic
programs available by default both on OSX and GNU/Linux systems we've
put in action some of the [Unix
philosophy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) principles
such as "Make each program do one thing well" or "Make every program a
filter", from text concatenation to PDF generation.

You can see the recipes and the results of the 2nd workshop session
\`please computer | make me design\`, or how to design posters using
only the command line
[here](http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/works/index.php?/projects/pc--mmd/).  
Feel free to download the working packages and try out for yourself.  
On Mac OS, all the commands are already available, on Linux, you would
need to install \`enscript\`.

Many thanks to Hong Phuc, Frederik, Eric, Adrien, Félix, Julien for the
great posters they've produced, and to Pierre M. and Wendy for their
help setting up the session!

[![](http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/osp_out-282x400.jpg "command line poster by OSP"){.alignleft
.size-medium .wp-image-4577 width="282"
height="400"}](http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/osp_out.jpg)

[![](http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/frederik_out-400x282.png "command line poster by Frederik de Bleser"){.alignleft
.size-medium .wp-image-4578 width="400"
height="282"}](http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/frederik_out.png)