29102013

We met a brilliant man today. Mr Rob Canning was a sweet little scruffy dude with a huge love and passion for open source software. He is currently a composer and a network artist. His work is mainly about searching for dialogues between algorithmic system based composition strategies and intuitive/improvised approaches.

Today he came in and gave us a little insight on what open source is really about. He teaches us all the secret nooks and crannies of the internet and how to search for completely free, non copy right material to use in our designs.

This attitude, he deems, is the Copy Left attitude.

Copyleft is obviously derived from it's sworn enemy, and complete antonym, Copyright.

As we all know, Copyright is a legal concept, used by most governments to grant the designer/creator exclusive rights to it's work in regards to distribution and usage. This is limited between a short period of time to 'protect' the creator and enabling them to financially support themselves. This also gives them rights for their work to be credited, to determine whether their work can be adapted to other forms, and prevent others from financially benefiting from their work.

Yet, Copyright has come down hard on all of us as designers. It has limited our work, which caused the existence of Copyleft.

Copyleft is using copyright law in the complete opposite way, which is to offer the right to distribute and remix work to anyone as long as that person chooses to do the same. In other words, Copyleft is a method that allows creative work to be freely modified by anyone who has also adopted the same Copyleft Attitude.

Amongst other things, he's also taught us about Floss + Art. FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you! Think of it like a free, open Illustrator. The wonderful thing about open source software like Inkscape is how we are encouraged as users, especially those familiar with coding to request a feature that you like, or help with the development of the programme.

To the right are links I've used which helped me hone my Inkscape skills.

I had to relearn a couple of things that differ from the way Illustrator works but overall, (especially since the shortcut keys were different) but it didn't take me very long and I'm warming up to the programme a lot more than I thought I would!

Floss + Art on Amazon

Below is a cool little technique.
I used nodes to make a very structured shape and made the selected nodes symmetric, which turned the nodes into a tear drop.

I decided to draw curls and flourishes, because it allowed me to play around with all the node tools, as well as the weight.

I added the simple stars and circles to the try out the tools on the side, as well as did shapes of my own such as the tear drop and the little leaves.

There are some tools that are unfamiliar to me. I think that because Inkscape is open source, it allows for much more ideas and more experimentation using the nodes and other tools which is quite fun to play around with.