 I actually have a question. I want to start with a question. How many of you know about Github? Please raise your hand. Oh, like everybody. How many of you know about Github? Raise your hand. Oh, same. Oh, I'm surprised. You know it's different, right? So I don't know. Maybe I'll go very quick on the first part. I had a little bit of introduction. Does anybody doesn't know what Github is? Maybe that's a better question. Please raise your hand. One, two, three. Oh, yeah, okay. So I'll do a little bit of introduction of what it is. So it's a version control system. What is a version control system? It's something that helps you control the source files you have in your project. So usually when you start a project, you have this file, you know, and then you improve it, you rename it, you want to keep history of it, and then it becomes insane. You know, everybody has gone through that. So, but version control, it's something you've experienced already. You know, if you've been editing Wikipedia, maybe you've checked the view history, and then you can see that you can go back in the history of the page and watch and have differences in the page you're visiting. If you've used Etherpad, which is an online collaborative text editor, there is a slider where you can go back in time and review the whole editing of the page. And then if you used Photoshop, even back 15 years ago, you had history panel where you can go back in the editing of your design. So it's something you used to, but all I showed here is very linear. It's a history, but it's a linear history. So Git is different. Git is also a version control system, but that allows you to have concurrent versions. That means you can have work on multiple versions at the same time, which is called branching. This is very interesting. And then GitHub, which is this online service, has kind of popularized the use of Git among programmers, but also beyond that. Now, more and more designers, maybe graphic designers involving web and so on, and beyond that too, are interested into using GitHub, because GitHub has popularized it and also has kind of made a secret source or a magic thing that got a lot of people interested into collaborating and understanding how Git works to collaborate. And so my goal, and this is something that I've been having the back of my mind for the past couple of years, is how to encourage designers to use version control systems such as Git to encourage collaboration among designers and to help them and change their workflows so that collaboration can happen between them and also improve or adapt their workflow to function with this. So three years ago, at GM 2013, I was in Madrid, first at GM for me, and I was presenting a project I was going to build right after at Interactivos in Madrid, which was called Design with Git. So Design with Git is this, no, that's not my mouse. It's a proof of concept. I wanted to design an interface for designers to make sense of working with versions of graphics. So in version controls programs such as Git, for example, you design something, you save it, then you change it, you save it again. But then you can compare the two versions, you know, and usually this is done with code, so it shows you this line of code that's changed with this line of code. And there's nothing, or at that point I'm not much solutions to have a visual difference. So I worked on this like SVG diff, because comparing version is called diffing files. So here I'm loading like a dummy repository I have on GitHub where I have three files, and then I can compare the files, and so here I have like a history of the changes on my files, so somebody, I mean, first created the file and then someone else changed it. And so I can compare the two versions just side by side or by having a slider to see, okay, then, you know, there's a difference between my old version and the new one, or just like quickly flip it, or have a pixel diff. And you also have the pixel right on the right image, the pixel in red are the ones that change with the pixel from the previous image. And then you have here a diff, I mean, because SVG is code and it's XML code, you can see here in the XML of the file which are the parts of the file that has changed. Usually you don't have something like this for SVG on GitHub and other version control visualization programs. So I worked on that, oops, sorry, it's not supposed to be that. I worked on that because I thought that was like a first step that would maybe encourage people or developers or other people to work with me on this and try to implement this in version control programs. I was also naive about programming and about how things move. And after that experience and trying to polish it and trying to see how it could be implemented in different things, I tried to find residences where I could focus time on building upon that. I tried to contact developers from GitLab, which is an open source version of GitHub, and other programs to say, listen, this is an interesting direction, there's a demand, can we please work on this? And so I've been doing that for the past two years, like here and there, when I would see an opportunity, I would try to push where I could to get into that direction. But we're not much success. So what happened is that last year I moved to a different country and I don't have a work permit there, so I had more time. So I thought, okay, let's spend more time with that project and so I thought I maybe need to do something else. I've tried to push it in different directions, nothing works. So let's go back to the drawing board. So I thought maybe I should search what exists already. I've been having these ideas, but maybe there's things existing. So searching. And then I found that when you Google or search or whatever the word you want to use, for design and versioning, you find digital asset management software. And this is like huge software that usually, if you don't work in a 500-people company, you maybe don't have access to. Which is helping manage assets. Let's say you work in a photography agency and you have millions of photos and you need to keep track of them and then you have versioning for that. And also assets for like a video game development for like Hollywood games, type games. They also employ like 200, 300 people that work on one game for four years. They have to track every bit of texture and everything. So this is digital assets management. There's big players in there. You cannot access the software if you don't have at least 50 employees. So I mean there was another, and I didn't want to go in that direction anyway. And the interface I was saying in the software was not very interesting. Then there's InVision App and PIX.io, two products, which is actually more about interaction design in the context of software or application for phones and stuff. And they help you review designs. You know, there's like an interface to review design. So they also do versioning because, you know, the designer is going to work in the background making multiple propositions, but there's not much more than this. I mean it's very, it could be interesting for other things, but that's not what I was looking for. Then there's Gravid.io, which was also an open source online application toward illustrations. And now they closed it and they have now this kind of like social community for drawing illustration online where people can fork each other and fork each other's design and collaborate. I mean it's interesting, but then it's again, it's closed and it's in this context of one application and that's not what I'm looking for. And then Layer Vault is more like they present themselves as the GitHub for designers. So it's very interesting, but they went bankrupt last year. They only existed for two years. I jumped in the game too late to actually test the application because nothing is available online anymore. That's what you have with online applications that go bankrupt is that they disappear. And so they have an interesting approach, but couldn't test it. But they had a competitor called Pixlabs and it's a very nice website. I think I was very surprised. It's really well made for designers. It's really like they send their page encourage collaboration. They have the whole discourse, but the application is quite well made with the right tools inside. It's a little bit over designed, I think. But it's really nice and it looked promising. The only thing is that they use Dropbox. So that's the thing. If you want to share files among designers, they use Dropbox. For a good reason, a lot of designers use Dropbox. But this is a no-go if you really want to do versioning because Dropbox is really crappy at versioning. If you upload your files, if you change them, they create versions of your file and they call it version one, which version two, version three. That's not really useful. Because you don't know. Yeah, you still have the dates, but... And then if you rename your file, you lose all your history. So don't trust Dropbox at all. And certainly don't trust them for versioning. And a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know, Pixlabs got bought by Dropbox. So since a year, no more development, no communication, nothing. It's in devoid. Interesting. And then, yeah. Then... Very interesting to study them. They also do versioning. Their app is like a Dropbox clone, of course. It's very interesting. You have this sitting on your desktop. You think you're going to access your files through that or something. But they're actually just selling you stuff. And then when you get online, they got the... They really managed Photoshop files really nicely. You expect that from them. And then if you upload HTML or CSS or JavaScript file, it's a binary file for them. Are you serious? Binary file. So they consider everything as an image. A doc file is also an image. A text file is an image. Everything is an image in the adult world. They've got some things that are interesting and inspiring. But again, you don't want to trust them because that's written in small prints. So after 10 days, we delete the best version from the source. So, thank you. Who wants to access work they've done more than 10 days ago? Nobody, I guess, at Adobe. Thanks, guys. So, next step. Why so many designers get on GitHub? I wanted to try to understand that. If I want to build the GitHub for designers, the open source one, of course. Why do they get on there? So I started searching for design files on GitHub, so media files. Have you tried searching for media files on GitHub? Who has? Nobody. It's impossible. You can only search text. It's code. It's only code. So if the final name is referenced in text and code somewhere, you can find it, but if you're looking for anything, an image, it's impossible. So I downloaded not all GitHub. It's 50 million projects. But I downloaded 1% of it. Thanks, Olivier. Olivier Manier, if you see me. Thank you for helping me with doing this. So I downloaded reference of 500,000 projects to study the inside of it. That's around 130 million files. And the funny thing is that 10% of it is media files. And out of this, 10% of it, most of it is PNGs. JPEGs, GIFs. There is 10% of that, which is SVG. That's very interesting. And then there is that other group. And I wanted to interest in that other group, because GitHub in the interface allows you to view these files and even do the diffing, a little bit of diffing, just a visual basic diffing. Not very efficient, but nice enough. So that other, I don't know if you can read it, but the top one is PDF. They also show PDF. So the top five, you can view it on the web interface. But then after that, there's TTF and WOFF. And so that's the most, I mean, the top most 10 with OGG, which comes as a fourth one and the ICO file as a fifth one there. So that's the 10 most used media files or available media files on GitHub. It's really funny because all of them are viewable in the browser. They only show five. Why? I mean, funny thing is PSD is not more popular than TIF. And AI, so a W straighter, is like way down at the bottom here. And then I'm also very pleased by that. And it's no more popular than STL. And STL files is 3D files for 3D printing. And GitHub is like so into it, they're like, you can view it, you can do diffing of STL file. It's at the bottom here. I mean, there's a whole lot of range of media files that are more interesting. But GitHub, the funny thing also is GitHub is promoting the fact that fund designers are using their application, but they're not really helping them. Hello, Dave. So tools. There's tools available. On the server side, okay, you have GitHub, use it because you can't download it. But there's GitHub and Gox. So those are two projects, open source projects that are available. You can install them on your server and you'll have a GitHub clone. The same feature and all. And then there's visual culture. That's a very interesting project by OSP. So visual culture is the tool for OSP to communicate to the outside and to encourage people to collaborate with them. And it's based on Git because they use Git as the core of the workflow, I would say. The only problem I had with it is that I tried to install it to run it. It's very much configured for their use of it. And I had a super hard time getting that page. And I couldn't go beyond that. So it's like... And then also, I mean, I had a question and I know there's a lot of OSP people here. So GitHub is based on Git, but it's giving more than Git. So it allows you to also manage issues, manage accounts. There's also pages. So that means you can turn your project into quickly something like a web page to present your project. So here visual culture is kind of like the part of GitHub where you have the presentation side, showing your project, and also the Git side. But there's not the issue side and the way to create an account on it and start interacting with OSP. So that's also a bit lacking for me. So on the local side, so on your machine when you use Git, you can really have common line. That's what you have. I mean, I like it, but designers don't really like it. But on the outside, for designers, there's not much because this is what you get as a GUI for Git. And that's really... I call it the Soyuz problem, you know? This Soyuz is like Russian aircraft. I mean, the interface of a Russian aircraft, a magnetic spacecraft. I mean, Git GUI is like this. I mean, for designers, this is really hard. And this is like a small part of the Git wiki about all the GUIs that exist. There's as much GUIs as people dissatisfied with GUIs, I think. This is really... I've tried to try them all, it's impossible. And then, GitHub again. They've done the GitHub desktop. And actually, it's quite good. Unfortunately, it's not open source, but they've kind of managed to make it more like something pleasing for the eye and more pleasing for designers. I know designers who use it, and I'm glad because at the moment, still you can use it with any Git repo. So it's called the GitHub desktop, but you can use it with your local repo so that's still a good thing. But we're lucky. We have great tools, the Diff tool, which I was trying to build, remember, two years ago. And it's called P4Merge and WebDiff. P4Merge is a freeware. A freeware. And then WebDiff, I wanted to show WebDiff, but maybe I'll skip that if I have time at the end. So no, I have to show it. I'm at the end anyway. Hold on a second. Typing. Yeah. So you see the problem. This is like someone worked on an image, and then someone else worked on an image afterwards to spot the difference. As a designer, you would like to see, what happened? What did I do six months ago? And there could be tools like this. It compares pixels and then shows you, oh, this is the pixel that has changed. So WebDiff does that. Plus it does also the thing where it shows you differences in code. It's based on a web interface, so it uses web technologies. So it will show the web files, that GitHub doesn't want to show you and all that. So it could be improved. Right now it's only doing images in code, but it's an open source project. P4 Merge is doing the same thing. It's a freeware by one of these damn thing, digital asset management company. It's really funny because you can download it for free and there's no end user license agreement and everything, but that's another project. Of course, you can also hook that to Git. So instead of typing the command I did, you said Git, WebDiff, and then you can do all the Diffing tool in your history and whatever. So that's very interesting and I think there's only a little bit of interface designed to do here to make it more interesting in the future. And that's where I am. That's where I'd like to get into a conversation with you, is that on the local side, we have a problem is that we don't have a Git GUI that is easy and designed for designers to feel some hard home. But we have WebTools, WebDiff, which needs a little bit of interface polishing and certain things that could make it even better, but it's already a great tool to use in your workflow. I suggest you try it. Now on the server side, I'm totally lost there. This is too much for me. There is GitLab, which is written in Ruby. I tried, I can't. Ruby is too much for me. Gox is written in Go. I don't even want to go down that road. And then visual culture is... Oh, it's pee. I mean, I need to. It's Python. I love Python. Django I never use. Okay, I can try to get into it. But then there's... It's so grounded in your culture that it's really hard to get into it and it's also... There's just things like, can I detach it from you guys? There's this thing where it's kind of hard to know where to go. But if anyone here is interested, I would be pleased to go on with a discussion about this and see how we can push them forward. Thank you. So that's the case of lots of work already done but also still some to be done. So we take a few questions. Yes. It's just I won't say... First media is not only... No. So like, because that's a question and we tried a lot of stuff and that we have been asking for our own project but it's really binary files, you know, XCF game files and actually if you find a solution I want it also because Git cannot work for this. Just because locally you get incredibly big repositories like when we have one XCF file which is like 100 mega then if you version it in the end the same file will be gigas and gigas and then you have 100 of files. So it's not really a question but just saying that it's... It's also a question for me if you find I'd be interested. I think that I could talk a lot more... I mean I had to redesign this talk like three times because there's also all the workflow how Git can change the workflow and has to change the workflow. We can talk also about file types. I think there's a lot of areas where we can go to experiment because for me the goal is to... The way I see how GitHub works and these kind of applications is to jump into projects because it looks like fun to jump into a project. We can criticize this attitude also. I mean there's a good side and a bad side to this but if we could have something in the design like this because there's icon designers, form designers on GitHub and it's not the same thing when you go on a form design repository on GitHub you go like, you know what I mean? It's amazing something. There's five workflows to imagine also that could fit and the tools that could fit. So yeah, versioning a video is going to be hard. Versioning sound also but maybe other things are easier. That's why I started with SVG. So another question. A few more. Hi. I'm curious actually to ask you two questions and one concerns the reactions that you had in the first place when you released the project and actually what developers, designers were responding to the ideas that you were proposing and the second is whether this is the time where graphic designers maybe should be open and embracing other kinds of interfaces and ways of working that don't involve necessarily visual interfaces and what you think about that and yeah, because maybe it's perhaps more profitable to put our efforts there rather than to try to find the perfect app and the perfect interface for versioning. I think there's first question is there's a lot of people interested. Everybody's like, oh that would be great. You know even in if people are really into this even in companies. It's a challenge for big business also this thing. So it's not like just small offices here and there. It's about the whole industry somehow if we can talk like this, sorry. But it seems to be like somehow everybody's waiting for it. I mean a lot of people have done things here and there but then it's kind of like there's a waiting for the recipe that's gonna kick out the whole thing somehow and then about interface I love common line so you got me there with you man. But you know it's not, there's only I mean there's visual people, very visual people it's like programming you know when some people talk to me about pure data or nodes and connecting nodes I'm like what do you do anything with this? I mean I can't, I like to write lines of codes but then some other people are the other way around. I guess that's the way you know how your brain is wired and then from then on get it to, you can try other things but then you know what works for you. So I'm trying to get as much people in the boat as possible. So one last question before lunch. Thanks a lot for the super presentation and I really liked also this year real overview because of all kinds of solutions from all kinds of different angles and whether they are open source or proprietary or hosted or local or but really trying to get a really overview of the problem. So yeah, I'm from OSP and it's true you're completely right that you're saying what you did that we made something that was really tied to us. It would be nice if somebody would be able to untie it I guess and we also tried once for that sadly failed. But to get back into this question I think you talk about two different things so they're kind of like presenting a project and making it inviting and finding a workflow and I think these are a bit different things because I think the workflow can be very dependent from the kind of design or the kind of media you're dealing with or the kind of project you probably need to design a workflow that goes along with it whereas if you're talking about presenting I think that's also the reason why with OSP we stuck to presenting and did not go further to make a tool about work but when you talk about presenting it's a bit easier step because if you say for example GitLab is open source so if you say we're gonna try and make GitLab show all these media files from these lists you showed then I think that's like an attainable goal for next year's LGEM because there is a kind of meta interface with the file system that all these projects can maybe somehow share and then when it comes about workflow I think then it's time to be much more specific and that's why I also found it interesting the SVG if project because you focus on a specific format maybe a specific workflow maybe so then I think it becomes a different question or something I guess that was not really a question but a remark but this is where I am the same step as you like confused between all these things but I think that to respond to that I think what I see on GitHub for example it's like they've kind of like standardized the readme file that this first thing you see when you come to see a project I like that I mean because that's I think it's a key to get engagement from people I think about workflow Git has thousands of workflows you can't describe just one and that's why the tool here is kind of like a safe a safeguard somehow you know it's not it's always in the realm of this but this is already like a huge thing and then yeah you're saying that your documentation is different and presentation is different than your workflow but what I perceive from your website it's not clear and on GitHub it's not clear either so I think that's the magic of these tools now is that they've kind of like Git existed long before GitHub but then suddenly with GitHub it becomes part of a system where you document, you promote and you invite people to join and what I'm looking for is design project where you don't know who you're going to work with and that's a very different workflow also it's like from the start I don't know how to work with it anyway, yes, thanks can I say like a different hat here so I'm in charge also like communication for the LGM so there's two things first there's a hashtag it's called LGM 16 so please use it so it's easier to find what you post online and then the second thing is if anyone is like to write and like to you know talk about things there is media like news like magazines like Linux magazine and so on I don't know if there's any journalists that's going to come over the weekend from these people but they're open to receive benevolent contribution so if someone feels like it's kind of like a cool project to write about LGM and to be published in a paper magazine please get in touch with me and start like writing notes or do your thing and then we can arrange that I'm sorry I won't be here this afternoon I'm really sorry but I'm lucky enough to have another event in London but I'll be here the rest of the weekend, thank you