From Stone to Spaceship: Collaborative Font Design

Views from the Old Belgian Sew Mill's facade

The two fonts created during the workshop

"The soon to be home of Medialab-Prado, Serrería Belga (Old Belgian Saw Mill), has its facades decorated with beautiful typography. Our collective task will be to liberate it from its stone prison and release it to the world. During a three day workshop we'll work our way into rescuing this type from the walls into the screen.

To go along with the community theme, we will only be using free/libre and open source software tools (F/LOSS) for every part of the design process, and the resulting work will be made available under the Open Font License (OFL).

We'll provide each participant with a full ready-to-use design software toolchain, as well as helpful tips for your first steps with libre tools and how to make the switch from your existing workflow. We'll be going deep into the technical aspects of putting together a font for distribution, touching subjects such as vector drawing, font formats, spacing and kerning, and libre font licenses. Finally, there will be time to discuss the conceptual details of font copyright, collective authorship and free licenses." By Manufactura Independente

Things you should bring:

1. Pencil, pen and paper

2. Your laptop with Virtualbox installed. Download it here:

  - Windows: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.18/VirtualBox-4.1.18-78361-Win.exe

  - Mac OS X: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.18/VirtualBox-4.1.18-78361-OSX.dmg

  - GNU/Linux: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads (your package manager should have an up-to-date version available, get that one if possible)

 

Check the result of the workshop here