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 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.
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!