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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.
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 with constraints, learning how to bring the modular thinking of web development into the domain of design for print.
"Calling wiki-to-print a practice indicates that it's more than a production tool" - Creative Crowds
During a converstation 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 reality of wiki-to-print as a practice. 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 FOSS Design and out of the box design software (like Adobe) the potentials for computational design
Within this chapter rather than further detail the lineage of web to print practices (as covered in the previous chapter), we will focus on the practice of working and thinking with wiki4print for the design of this book.
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