Andy Fitzsimon

Costume party on the weekend and the host actually put a video of me on youtube. scandal.

For those still confused.
To everyone’s time I wasted I’m sorry. I’m sure thats all of you.

Do you publish PDF’s of marketing collateral showcasing free software?

I’ve noticed that not everyone eats their own dogfood!..
and There are some unlikely offenders.

There are plenty of ways to generate quality materials from free software. Below are some properties screens that let you know the creator cares about FOSS.

People dont just pay for propietary software with the price tag. You pay for it by looking like a dweeb who uses another platform to the one they promote:

The final irony here being that I took those screenshots in the linux version of acroread.

I test with acroread because printers render with the same output.
For everything else there’s poppler with evince

• NOFX - Don’t like my city
• Bodyjar - Know how to please a crowd
• The Mars Volta - Are truly artists. I am speechless. Karla is blown away.

I’m a big fan of forks/branches in free software: Beryl, Inkscape, Xorg.. Well, It seems Mars Volta is a ‘fork’ of At the drive in which went on to become Sparta. Two great bands evolving into two contrasting great sounds.  Congrats to them both.

Just a quick mention that James of linux australia podcast fame just held a graphic design round-table

Things I wish I mentioned: gimp, scribus, fontforge & libregraphics efforts

No new shapes, no altered colours, just deleted strokes and svg blur revitalising an old favorite into a new aesthetic

story: While Inkscape’s feGaussianBlur support was first being implemented, I did this quick demo on some old Bluecurve assets created by Garrett for a colleague to illustrate how easy it is to ‘remix’ vector artwork.

 One day I’ll hopefully come back and do more with the bluecurve set. I’m not sure…
Honestly, I think OpenClipart+Tango + Echo+Fedora are my priorities once I get a free second from:

Another dfong inspired vectorisation

svg version

will someone finish it for me ?

Inspired by Dianas blog post: I quickly tried my luck at a hot air balloon and got distracted by drawing plants. Will try again at lunch tomorrow.

Click for SVG

Will take it apart and throw on openclipat later (logoless of course)

I just had to buy some Batik artwork while I was in China late last year. Not because im a fan of the production process (an amazing amount of craft & effort), but because Batik the Apache SVG tools are just so awesome.

Most of Inkscapes initial coding for SVG compliance was checked against Batik as a role model for valid renderings from the SVG spec. But this is not why I had to have some Batik of my very own.

FOP and batik are essential parts of the professional open source publishers dream tool-chain.

Even graphics geeks like me can look at graphical admonitions in a book ( you know those Tip, Warning, Note & Caution callouts we see in technical documentation ) and throw in some Inkscape generated SVG icons and volla. Automated builds of PDFs now contain 100% sexy vector callouts.

Even technical illustrations/diagrams come out great and because they are single source managed in SVG we can translate whole books right down to terminology in illustrations in one simple build.

When it comes to any large print run of single materials like cd covers boxes, posters and cards I’m the first to jump into a session of Scribus. but when it comes to translating & building from docbook and xml FOP FOP FOP batik & inkscape fop fop rinse & repeat.

One of the purest forms of leadership I can think of is when something both inconvenient & innovative happens and the people capable of stunting its growth refuse to stand in the way.

One day I hope to witness a decision like that being taken place. It would truly be a privilege to surrender profit & power for a universally beneficial change.
In the meantime we have Vista. Congratulations to the Microsoft team

No hang on,
This post was meant to be about mentorship. Something I would really benefit from.

I am currently seeking a design mentor who has the time and motivation to take me on as a mentee:

• Somebody who can understand motivations for free software & free culture.
• Relate to durkheim’s theorys of a collective conciousness & Understand design theory as it applies to communities, brands & cultures.
• Freedom of communication design, typography, design across cultures and countries (especually the ones i dont yet understand).

If pretty much anything there rings a passionate tune and you are willing to share your experience, please drop me a line here.

Okay so Sydney has been awesome so far. Karla has had the chance to catch up with her brother, participate in the wonderful partners program and also score a ‘linus sighting’ at the Google party.

LCA is a great chance to meet up with those mates who you only get to see once a year (but talk to every day ). Morgan Tocker from MySQL spent last year living down the road from us but now he’s off to montreal where we will only see him at LCA (and the next libre graphics meeting ) plug plug

For those who weren’t able to make it… the conference looks a little like this.

Okay thats a photo Karla took when her group visited the Zoo yesterday.

My talk starts at 11 in matthews C. Rock on by if you are even vaguely interested in web technologies, publishing, artwork or just wasting time by watching bling bling. If else please visit Chris’s Sugar talk and report back to me for theft of your brainy cached data stuffs