I discuss revivalist trends in art with relationship to the hand-made and folk tradition, specifically in fiber arts. Innovative artists, having digital fluency, easily navigate networked communities and collaborate openly. By comparing pixels to patchwork, vectors to stitches, bitmaps to patterns, and layers to quilts, they investigate the overlap among a variety of disciplines.

Jumping off of previous discussions about the barriers preventing professional designers from using F/LOSS graphics programs, this talk will present the Open Colour Standard. OCS is a project intended to add precise colour to the F/LOSS graphics workflow. It aims to make professional colour management a reality for F/LOSS graphics.

Inkscape’s popularity is growing day by day. How do we help new users master the tool? How do we welcome these users and invite them to participate in the community and contribute their art, their bug reports and their ideas to help us innovate? This talk briefly summarises the available resources out there from online tutorials, screen-casts, channels & forums to the offline books, magazines, courses, classes and user groups. Half talk, half debate, this session aims to set the scene for a discussion on the issues of supporting new users, and explore ways to do it better by sharing ideas and working together.

Graphic design as a discipline seems to be firmly focussed on print media, leaving designing for the screen to interaction and web designers. This is a shame. As we spend more time online, public space itself is becoming digital, and in this space the pluriformity of contemporary graphic design is sorely missed. In interface and web design, aesthetic decisions by a few major software developers have a disproportionate effect on the visual landscape.

In the past, applying a free software development style to web applications blocked development on the Open Clip Art Library. The project has nearly joined the #FAIL list multiple times. Since web sites are centralized pieces of software running continuously, there is a need for secure access to the live code. This forces a division of managing a running website, merging software changes from developers, and keeping development on the software progressing healthily. To complicate matters, a site like Open Clip Art Library has an active base of librarians and artists uploading and editing new clipart. The new Aiki Framework aims to solve all these issues.

Phatch is a user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and EXIF Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. It can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners and many more actions – in minutes instead of the hours or days needed to do so manually.

Learn how to worry less about the file system and more about your artwork in this overview of Inkscape workflows. Various details of the workflow and tools are discussed with specific examples from projects including, but not limited to, Firefox, GNOME and Moblin.

NodeBox 2 is an open-source application that generates visual output based on programming code, a node-based interface or natural language (i.e. English.) In the user interface you connect nodes (building blocks) together to create interesting visuals. Nodes can be opened to examine or edit the (Python) source code. AI techniques allow the system to evaluate written text and transform it into nodes using analogy and conceptual association.

Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

This session will be a moderated panel discussion of some specific questions that relate to how the FOSS graphics suite can or should react to the RIA movement, which is largely non-free. In addition to Picnik and the other well-known services, Google Docs has now added a Drawing app, so RIA isn’t going away.