 Thanks for having me here and I'm very, very glad to follow this presentation by Nathan because what I will tell you about is also about a project that was a sprint. It happened in one week in five days. It happened a bit less than two months ago and it was a workshop that I directed. Just a little word maybe about me. I'm an artist and designer mostly and I did this little thing that some of you have seen. And so this workshop was about producing, designing a specimen book with Libre open source fonts. So what is a specimen book and why do we need a specimen book? If you design a project with type, be it a book or a magazine or nowadays a website even, one of the really first steps you have to attack is to find the good fonts that will match the content and that will work. And this is an important step and it can take really a lot of time because there are really many good fonts that you may want to use. And it's a very psychological, personal and sensitive thing to find the appropriate font for a certain text, for a certain story or narration. It's not just about beautiful letter shapes. Actually when you read a story or an article or an interview, you don't want to see beautiful letters, but you want to go into the text. So the font has to become transparent. It has to become invisible actually. So it will be very dependent of the subject, of the language also, the texture of type changes with different languages. It can have a kind of temperature. A font can be sharp or thick or fast or slow. And so for that, already centuries ago, since we have type, producers of typefaces have done specimen sheets. Here is a very old example by the great William Caslin. And we can see here are patterns that we use still nowadays. It's a specimen sheet nowadays on Google web fonts. Looks very, very similar to this. You have different weights, you have the short paragraphs, different sizes, showcasing all the different cuts. There is some sample text, which should not be too distracting. So here it is in Latin. And here is a bit of a closer look. So in a very small space, the type designer, the type producer wants to show you everything that font can do. And also, since he is a font producer, he wants to sell the fonts. So there are kind of conflicting interests sometimes with those specimens. This is a very well-known book by typographers during the last decades. The great font book by FontFont, which has hundreds and hundreds of fonts over those pages. And each font has a few lines showcasing the letters, the glyphs, has short paragraphs of four lines, which is actually very little to judge how the font will render on the whole page of the book. So for me, this was always very frustrating. It was a bit like if you would be a musician and try to select a sound from a sound library, but you have to listen to 20 sounds at the same time, which makes it very hard to concentrate. For a strange reason, they stopped producing the book recently. Apparently, print is too expensive. They made an iPad app, so you cannot actually test those fonts even on paper, which for me, when you make a paper project, is essential because it works completely different than on screen. There is an interesting other currently existing font specimen collection, the Free Font Index by Hans-Lee Klemmer, which gathers lots of free fonts, but doesn't make a distinction between free and libre, which is an important point, of course. And it also puts many, many fonts on a limited number of pages, which is not always that useful. And it juxtaposes fonts that may not match entirely in terms of style. So I think those books are useful. They show you many different fonts, but they have some unpractical points, like too little space for a font, always the same sentence repeating all the time, so it starts to be quite annoying and distracting at some point. The Quick Brown Fox jumps over Lazy Dogs by Box-Kempfer, Jagen, Eva-Queer, Durchsild, and some Loram Epsum. And then another category that appeared recently is Print on Demand Books, made by independent type producers. Vernon, did you do something like that? Or did you have something like that in mind at some point? Yeah? So those aren't free fonts, they are commercial proprietary fonts, but this one is made by Radim Peshko, a young check designer. And another one is made by Jean-Baptiste Levé, a famous French type designer. And we can see that they have one thing in common, they love to show the fonts very, very big, so you can appreciate the beauty of the curves and of the glyphs, which is, of course, very nice and impressive. But for many use cases, like doing books or magazines, it's actually really not useful. And you have much too little paragraph-sized text, too much big type. And so the really logical thing to do if you work with Libre fonts is that you do your own specimen book. There are lots of open source fonts. You have Print on Demand technology, so just do it. This would be, of course, extremely expensive if you would want to make your own printed specimen book with commercial fonts. You would have to be really rich, but now today it is possible to do. So I had that idea in mind like one year ago, and it was also clear to me that this has to be a collaborative project, not one person sitting for months doing it, but rather a book sprint, like a group of five, ten people gathering and doing it. So I started to pitch a bit, and I talked about it at the latest RMLL in Geneva in last summer. And I was pitching schools, but there wasn't much reaction to that, strangely. I was surprised. I thought it would be a really, really good idea to do that with students, design students. But no school reacted, and then by chance, through some personal connections, I managed to get a gig at the design department in Geneva. And I had a workforce of 12 students for one week to work on that project. So we established some rules that was to use exclusively Libre fonts that allow any type of the four freedoms to focus on body text, that means text that can be used for real long form, and to make the book as open as we can, which means sharing the sources, documenting everything, using an open format and so on. And that were the main three bullet points. The first step was that the students had to produce a standardized specimen layout, and this was actually a lot of research during the first two and a half days, with many different approaches, different formats, different graphic attempts, lots of discussions, a lot of criticism. I had a kind of pragmatic approach. I just wanted to have something that looked quite close to what we have in a book. The students, they were very focused on perfect harmony and breathing space and wide space, so on. So this was what they achieved and agreed upon in the end. It was a mutual compromise. And the next thing that was needed, in parallel, there was a search for an appropriate source text, because when you design a specimen, you need to have some sample text to have something on the page, and this is a very tricky choice as well. So we looked at what other specimen books did, we studied the competition, and what inspired us a lot was this little book by Fred Smeyers, type now, a Dutch great type designer, and he has about 20 pages of specimen of his own fonts in this book, and what is interesting is that it's not always the same sentence that repeats, but it's one text that flows through those 20 pages, and it's a very interesting, nice dialogue about the production of fonts, which was written in the 16th century in French by Christophe Plantin, and it works very well. You can watch the fonts, but it also feels like a live, real text, which is important. So our decisions were a real text, a real narrative. It has to be in the public domain, of course, because we wanted the book to be freely distributable, and it has to be French, because as we said, language influences the texture. So we found that book, Le Futur, a nice pre-science fiction novel from the 19th century by this author, main character Thomas Edison. The story is something that influenced later Metropolis and Blade Runner, an artificial, mechanical woman. It was published more than 100 years ago. The author died. It is in the public domain in most countries. Now, the word count, it was quite a lot. So we had to check if it was feasible. We divided by the number of people, estimated the number first per specimen, about 15 specimens per person, maybe a bit more doable. And so the real sprint started, and it was a lot of work. On the little sticky notes, those are the names of the fonts, which are labeled by color for Serif, Sans and Mono. They also did some personal creative specimens. Some of them had to be dropped because Amazon didn't validate them. And so the result, the parts that worked, is that the book exists. You can purchase it online in many countries. It is a physical book, and there is a copy here and a few others. If you want, please have a look at this. You can get a few. It's really useful, I think, honestly. And the sources have been shared. I managed to get them all into GitHub and participate and commit and so on. And they had some live interaction with some of the designers of the fonts, which was really important. They had to handle the communication. There was a debate internally in the school about if we can actually publish it or not. It's still undecided. Shortcomings and failures, proprietary workflow, broke the ambition of doing it in Scribes. I learned some stuff from that, which is I will let them do just freely what they want in the beginning, and then at some moment I will learn them to do it in Scribes, which doesn't work. It has to be decided really from the beginning very strictly, otherwise under time pressure you will fail. So that was the big lesson for me. Also some analysis that can be interesting if you want to do similar workshops. Conclusions, get to the book or have a look at it, do your own version of it, improve it, collaborate, and talk about that later. Thanks.