Chapter 4b: Public: FLOSS Design

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FLOSS Design principles and processes:

Choice of fonts, and design values/ethics/considerations, licensing, questions of openness, and federation, other ways of organising.

Link to pad that is being shared between design and computational publishing chapters. A record of meetings to get familiar with designing with wiki4print.

FLOSS Design: Fricitious Ecologies?

In-grid wiki-to-print(ing)

The design work for the book was done primarily by members of In-grid. We started to participate in the servpub project in May 2023. At that time none of us were particularly familiar with the technical setup of wikis or computational publishing with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). As design practitioners, our reliance on the Adobe suite that has a toolset tailored to print and digital publishing had to be reconsidered. Our encounter with with web to print practices has been thanks to Creative Crowds and the use of wiki-to-print, which operates on Servpub as wiki4print. In-grid has been on a journey of working within the constraints of open-source design, both learning how to bridge the practices of web development into the domain of design for print, but also entering into the ecologies of FLOSS.

"Calling wiki-to-print a practice indicates that it's more than a production tool" - Creative Crowds

During a conversation with Creative Crowds, they expressed that it's difficult to talk about wiki-to-print in a general way, as it was made for particular situations, both technical and social. They explained that calling wiki-to-print a tool flattens the socio-technical practices of wiki-to-print. The social practice of wiki-to-print(ing) has thus become a way for In-grid to think about: the relational aspects that emerge within the Servpub project the productive frictions between FLOSS Design and out of the box design software (like Adobe) the potentials for computational design

Within this chapter we bring together some conversations In-grid had with both CC (some of the maintainers of the wiki-to-print software) and Johanna De Verdier (the designer of this book (+ In-grid member)). Through these interviews, we aim to share how this printing infrastructure, social practice and its frictious process shapes and situates what wiki4print is in action.

Conclusions / design colophon?

bits below with comment could be good for design colophon.

Social practice

We had our first workshop at CCI UAL that aimed as a knowledge sharing session from Systerserver and Varia, which we began set up the first Raspberry Pi that now hosts servpub.net. From there, we then had another two other public workshops that walkthrough the technical setup of the Raspberry Pi, network protocals, self-hosted platforms, and facilitating working session discussion.

What we used and why

Excalidraw for moodboard/ brainstorming, opensource font website for font choice (BADASS LIBRE FONTS BY WOMXN, openfoundry, velvetyne, The League Of Moveable Type etc...), riseup pad for communication and documentation, and jitsi for videocalls... All fonts used in this book are under the SIL Open Font License: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL.

(A section for talking about online x to y converters, like jpg to ASCII and the image dithering tool. As it's great part of internet history)

When we started working on this project, we had to challenge ourselves to take stock of the mainstream tools we instinctively used (Figma board for moodboard, photoshop for mockup, google fonts for font choice...etc). Although we are computational practioners who code creative software, we found that we made a division between design tools and software development tools. It sounds like an inconvenience to give up on using those designed for professional outcome softwares. We believe that using FOSS promotes collaboration and innovation within the community.

Difficulties / Observations

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