 Thank you for that. Hello everyone. So as Victoria has said, I am the former editor of Labour Graphics magazine Which is also a former magazine We published from 2010 to 2016 and Then gave up because it took too much time and effort and it wasn't a job for any of us But what I will be talking about today is one of the issues raised in the course of that work which is How to get graphic designers to actually believe that it's reasonable to use free Libre and open-source software for graphic design work because we spent five years trying to do that and I should say I have a background in graphic design. So I'm trained as a graphic designer. I have a BFA in it These days I'm an academic, but I'm afraid that happens sometimes. Oops But so for me, this is this is a big issue because There's this enormous prevalence of belief that you need to use Adobe Creative Suite to be a graphic designer and it's just straight up full-on not true at all And we spent years proving it in print, which is the hardest thing But let me go back and do a little bit of an anecdote in 2009 when I was fresh out of design school and very sure of myself I gave a talk at Libre Graphics meeting in Montreal About why graphic designers don't use open-source software go figure and at the time I had a bunch of reasons based on my own very meager at the time experience because I was a brand new graduate I was working a bit. I was exhibiting a bit. I had friends who were designers but you know Not very big experience to draw on to say here is why unilaterally graphic designers don't use your software to a bunch of open-source software developers And the reasons I gave don't matter but they're roughly the same as the reasons I bring to you today with nine years more experience and No more empirical data than I had at the time Because I don't have a pocket full of numbers on adoption of free Libre and open-source software by graphic designers No, that's fine. They don't move. I move them Yes, thank you though, okay Because I haven't gotten to this part yet, but I will now so in 2010 two colleagues and I two friends Who run a design studio called Manifracture and Dependence which is based out of Porto in Portugal? We did this and This was done at Libre Graphics meeting 2010 in Brussels where we are now and this was a thing that we were commissioned to do by an arts organization that was running LGM that year and We liked it. So we made this little print publication of work on Libre Graphics and you know it was okay, right? We got better after that But having done this one little thing. We decided that we wanted to do it again and properly So from that point for the next five years we spent far too much time and far too much of our own money publishing a quarterly print magazine on Professional quality uses of free Libre and open-source software and it was very pretty and We used all of the normal things that people who develop free software use This is a little artist's rendering of what our Git logs look like We do we use GitLab at the time. It was Gatorias and You can see you know how we worked on it I did the majority of the editorial heavy lifting They did the majority of the layout and so you see these sort of states of activity Eventually we convinced our columnists to actually contribute through the version control system as well, which was pretty good and Because we licensed it under a permissive license We wound up with things like this Some random other people decided that they wanted to do a Collection of the first volume of the magazine. So they printed this wonderful totally not bootleg right collected volume of Volume one of Libre graphics magazine on you know normal paper is wonderful But super cool right the kind of transformative use that we wanted to see We did this you know, I mean this is the sort of Variety of work we did in the five years that we did it Because the purpose this is it falls down by the way The purpose was to prove that one could do print design With a purely free software workflow Because historically people had said to us as well as in general That maybe free and open source software is fine if you're just doing web design But it's not gonna cut it for print So we spent five years fighting with Scribes for example ha ha ha We spent five years using inkscape using the GIMP Using version control systems using Vim and nano and right The Vim Morris I use nano they use them. We don't care And It was beautiful and it was wonderful and we did it for a goodly while and we showed off wonderful work like The icon set from KDE Right great stuff, but the question still remains at this point Why don't other people do this? It's eminently possible. We have proved it's possible many people have proved it's possible The evidence of this room is that it is possible, right? Since there's now a lovely new movement of people promoting open-source design awesome So this morning I went on a popular tech job website and did a little search for graphic design in Berlin Because you know there's lots of companies hiring lots of people to do computer poking things in Berlin and of the Ten results I found on the first page of my search that were actually seeking out a graphic designer In those ten three of them Didn't mention illustrator or Photoshop Which is pretty awesome there were actually three jobs for graphic designers that did not explicitly require competency in illustrator or photoshop of The seven that did one of them actually said or Equivalent wire framing and illustration software also awesome But that means that in my very unscientific survey of ten jobs 60% of them required that you have competency in Adobe creative suite in order to get the job period now Given that these days I have rolled over from being a designer to being an educator. I find this enormously problematic because if I want to Wander into a graphic design classroom and teach a bunch of university students how to be designers They're gonna want to learn Adobe creative suite because they will look at the marketplace That they will be walking into as graduates and they will say ah This is the thing I need to do to get a job. It was like this when I was in design school We rebelled when in our 3d modeling class. They weren't teaching us rhino Because some people said yes, but we need rhino to get jobs So what did we do as students we organized workshops in rhino in order to get the competencies? We thought we needed to be employable because unfortunately I Wish we lived in a different world where we didn't all need to be employed, but you know Rent tragically must get paid Yeah, I know I Would love it if we could be paying our rent in More ethical ways than we are currently able to do so the question that I put in this talk in the The abstract for it is Let's see. What did I say? What kinds of ecosystems do we need to have to successfully do Libra graphics in? professional contexts and when I say Libra graphics I also include you know Open standards and permissive licenses and all those wonderful things that make up the ecosystem of floss This is an open question at this point and one that I'm still trying very hard to think about And what time am I at? Oh Here's the good news. I had an energy drink this morning and it worked So I've burned through most of what I have to say in 10 minutes Which is awesome because I only wanted to take 15 because I do want to leave some time for you all but a thing I'm working on at the moment is Since we know that in the big companies generally speaking including in some companies that make money off of open source Proprietary software for graphic design as the dominant paradigm a lot of people who want to do work with floss In design tend to open their own little studios and do really nice work You know for cultural organizations for example, and there's some wonderful examples of that in Brussels There's a great group of people called open source publishing who do really nice work using free software There's several examples in Brazil. You know people doing again great professional work for money shocker In the context of small studios using free software, which is a great thing because it's totally doable It's totally possible and You shouldn't need to be stuck in a proprietary ecosystem Where you're being charged an arm and a leg to use a piece of software that you have no control over I Apologize if I sound a bit like a free software zealot, but I am so So it's a bit logical that I would sound that way So some questions that I've started thinking about with Colleagues who also try to teach floss graphics tools to design students We exist as a subset of people There's at least six of us who are you know wandering around being like how do we get this in universities? And how do we have our students and administrators not kill us for teaching the wrong things? Yes So we've been thinking about how do you make curriculum that? introduces these things as For example a choice right because it's a bit ridiculous to go to a university degree and be taught how to use a Specific version of one piece of software. It's not super smart because you're gonna go obsolete pretty fast Right you still need to learn the next version when it comes out and Goodness knows we all grumble when we get an update on something right so. Oh, no an update has been pushed will my computer work Oh, no, there's a new version of Photoshop. Where have they moved the thing that I use every day, right? So it seems a bit counter-intuitive that we spend three years or four years teaching students how to use a specific thing that then goes out of date and Treating that as as necessary. So one potential paradigm choice in software education, so thinking about How you teach the principles of design While also providing students with options about how they execute on those principles But these are open questions at this point and I didn't come up with a very good conclusion to this in my notes I have this this point six which I'll move on to a prettier slide to contextualize this my very illuminating note for myself is as I look back at what we did with Libra graphics magazine I Wonder how we feed into the education employment ecosystem and You know, unfortunately, I've walked up here with a little story and a lot of energy and no conclusions to this other than Wouldn't it be nice if we could get out of the clutches of adobe as people feeding into systems That you know rely on open source, right as we're all standing here or sitting here in the case of most of you As we're all in this room thinking about ideas on open source design. I Would like to be the slightly grumpy one. This is my grumpy face and say Though it is wonderful for people to contribute design of any kind to open source software products Projects not products. That's a Freudian slip Though it is wonderful for people to be contributing to open source and free software in Anyway, it would be so much better if we were all using free Libra and open source design software instead of the big Hydra That is adobe creative suite Because it's just as good. The only reason you're not using it is because you're not used to it or because you're locked in by you know corporate interests and your own education and and and Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we were better people? Here's some magazines. I'll stop talking now. Thank you and I hope there are some Yeah, well no because we're total snobs and Our our belief we we were sort of raised as designers on beautiful print magazines So I spent my education reading print, which is the name of an actual really beautiful graphic design magazine my two European colleagues were used to reading I and emigre and And you know like when we were in school. I don't know how it is now Print was still super important right like young graphic designers and older ones get their hands on magazines and read them and enjoy them and Hand them to other people and put them on coffee tables and that was what we wanted to do Yeah, well Of course. Yeah, I mean if you want to do Raster graphics you can use Gimp you can use Krita if you want to do vectors you can use inkscape, which is wonderful I realized the other day that I've been using inkscape for a decade, which is ridiculous You know, but I have actually been using inkscape as my primary vector graphics tool for a decade. It's possible We won't talk about Layout because that's a bit of a fuzzy area But if you're doing anything with 3d, right wonderful stuff blender amazing lots of people actually have a preference for using blender but to me the sort of the workhorses are Gimp and inkscape because they're your and I Hesitate to say this because there's a gimp developer in the room, but they're your replacements for Photoshop and Illustrator They're not Directly equivalent, which is a very important thing to remember Because you can't expect to wander into the gimp and have it work like Photoshop, but they do the same work You know you can be just as good a designer with gimp instead of Photoshop and inkscape instead of Illustrator Have they just learned the proprietary software? To me there's two prongs in that one is yes They have learned that and when you learn something it becomes your default if it's the first thing you learn Right like if you're switching over from Mac to Linux Yeah, of course, you will say Linux. It's so difficult. It's so Unintuitive I hate the word intuitive Right because what is intuition? It's just the things that you've learned and internalized however, of course Those proprietary software packages are made by companies that can afford to employ people who do usability work which Hey, isn't it great that open-source design exists because suddenly there's a community of people who have some expertise in Usability and user research and UX who can be feeding into The free Libra and open-source graphics software that that we should all love and that maybe some of us do already love Yeah, so yes and no Yeah Yeah Totally and that's the thing we need to remember about all software right we're always all working around things Goodness are we oh I think that's it. Yeah you thank you