Workshop on fun commandline poster generation.
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Be them libre or proprietary, graphic designers usually work with software through a graphical interface. Nothing wrong with that except when those programs are presented as fully-featured and self-sufficient. The idea behind this workshop was to introduce graphic designers to a completely different paradigm, namely the command-line. 

Contrary to the Swiss army knife kind of software, command-line tools tend to be designed for executing one single specialized task; for instance the program tr substitutes a character with another. Options give access to features that are often discarded in graphical software simply because they don't fit into the screen. Not to mention that being scripts, they ease the possibility to create generative designs, something that is hardly achievable with mainstream design software.

Those one-purpose tools may seem trivial at first glance. But their faculty to be combined allows one to build one's own tools, just like Lego® bricks. Programs act like filters, taking an input, and outputting it transformed.

The workshop consists of a brief presentation of a basic set of command lines tools and the Unix philosophy which shapes them. Using those programs available by default both on OSX and GNU/Linux systems and after taking notes on avant-garde concrete poetry and contemporary text-based design, we've asked the participants to design posters only by the means of text.

We prepared a package containing tutorials, cookbooks, references, manuals, etc. which you can download in English or in French (on Mac OS, all the commands are already available, on GNU/Linux, you would need to install enscript for the last step).