label

practices

Linked to 2 items

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 51:52 That’s why, if you speak about the tools that we use, we speak about Free/Libre, open-source software, meaning that it’s not necessarily free as in freedom. So that’s why the Libre is there, and practicesif you use the cracked version of the Creative Cloud, you don’t have to pay for it. So in that sense, it’s free, but otherwise, you are reaffirming an existing ecosystem that sets the Creative Cloud as the standard, synonymous with being a professional designer or being a professional publisher — that’s where our practice tries to install an alternative. Using that alternative doesn’t make our work all of a sudden more relevant, but I think that, in our practice, it generates new possibilities for collaboration. More importantly, it creates the potential for you as a publisher, or for us as designers to shape more elements of your whole publishing pipeline. toolsWith the Almanac, both the research and editing parts are done within the same tool, but it’s also done horizontally and collaboratively. Web-to-print allows last-minute text changes quite horizontally, so you can create a platform where editors or contributors can come in, and make text changes without having to ask the designer to do it within their existing tool. Finally, if a certain functionality is not there, users can create that functionality within the tool and of course, this is not easy, it takes energy. What’s important here — and this is not entirely true because it’s a little bit romantic — is the idea that the tool is never finished, but there’s a certain assumption within proprietary software that “this is it, this is what you can do with it”. Is this thought of? Well, it’s possible that it doesn’t work for you and then you can change it, so we might not know everything from the outset.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 1:16:59 practicesTo come back to this “toolship” practice: if you say that practice is the designer and the tool is the programmer, you have those two distinct roles of being a designer and a programmer. In reality, those roles exist. What I think we try to do in our practice is to make those roles more blurry and to say, you can be both a programmer and a designer at the same time and the license sort of explicitly creates the legal infrastructure to do it, but at the same time, as a participant, you still have to put in the work. To come back to what Janez said, you need a certain type of skill. I want to be both positive about it and say there is a relevancy to it and also be realistic. It requires a certain skill that takes work to learn, it’s called a programming language and it is a language with all that comes with it — learning the language, vocabulary, learning new grammar. It’s also about learning a different culture, which can expand your thinking in interesting, surprising ways.