Planet Open Clip Art Library News   

This is a small world

This morning when going to work I somehow noticed (I usually don't look for such things) this small poster glued on the wall of a building close to my office (less than 50 meters away):

Noting out of the extraordinary, some small firm advertising for pet services, but what drew my attention was the drawing in the top-right corner with a dog head. It was looking familiar, as it is one of my drawings published at the Open Clip Art Library and it made my day!

I made it years ago, exercising original drawing made with the mouse, so the result is not great, but I submitted it to the library anyway, as I do with all my drawings which are not made for a specific project. And I found awesome how a little graphic contributed to an international project found its way back to a few meters away of me. Either the world is very small or what we are doing is really useful for the people.

Now to be honest, I can't say for sure if the image is taken from openclipart.org, from my own website, where the images are also available, or from one of the many other websites redistributing, grace to the PD dedication, the openclipart.org content. But this is irrelevant, the goal was achieved.

PS: is not wise to base your company logo on Public Domain clipart, but for very small companies this is not a real problem, they don't have real branding.

November 03, 2009 12:28 PM

Clip Art of the Month: Holiday images

November 2009 Clip Art of the Month salutes the Holiday Season!

Businesses shut down. Productivity slows to a halt. Shopping malls are so full of people they’re bursting at the seems. These are just some of the ideas brought to mind as the end of the year approaches and a new Holiday Season is upon us.

A source of stress, at times, the Holidays can also be a time of togetherness and unity for people. Clip art images by liftarn (above) and bloodsong (below) beautifully demonstrate how simple and effective imagery can articulate these same feelings.

Vector graphics have also been stylistically implemented by mcol’s Christmas tree in the spirit of the Holiday Season.

The Open Clip Art Library is always evolving and welcomes contributions from everyone around the world.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

November 02, 2009 02:28 PM

Clip Art of the Month: Raulxav’s RSS Music Icon

“Clip Art of the Month” honors for October of 2009 go to raulxav for his unique spin on the RSS feed icon.

Regular internet users know that RSS feeds can significantly reduce time spent finding new content on your favorite web pages.  With this influx of content flooding users’ RSS Readers, content producers must find ways to attract new subscribers and keep them reading.

While valuable content is the surest way to accomplish this, the importance of catching a reader’s eye cannot be ignored.

Raulxav has demonstrated other ideas for RSS icons, and I encourage you to consider ways in which you might catch a reader’s attention.

Visit the Open Clip Art Library to learn how you can contribute.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

October 21, 2009 01:21 PM

Open Clip Art Library New Interface Revealed

I nearly missed this if not for Jon Cruz tweeting it, but TuxRadar made a new podcast talking about Open Clip Art Library’s new interface. Let’s consider this, a press hit! Even though the new interface isn’t quite ready, the old one is working!

September 24, 2009 11:15 PM

Open Clip Art Library Uploads Online

Thanks to michi, Open Clip Art Library is accepting uploads once more. Upload away! Michi and Bassel have some new things coming which will make hacking on Open Clip Art Library much easier.

Also, a big congratulations to Bassel for being promoted to admin! He is also now on the http://planet.openclipart.org and our news: http://planet.openclipart.org/news

September 24, 2009 08:52 PM

Jono’s “Art of Community” Released Under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 License

Jono contacted me to review his book about community management, The Art of Community, awhile ago. You should buy it and read it no less than 3 times. The chapters are well split, and provide great examples that make this a classic of the scale of my other favorite book about Open Source, Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source (How to Run a Successful Free Software Project). Jono’s book is now freed to be translated, transmitted, reformatted as long as one doesn’t make money off the work and does share back any changes since the book is now CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licensed. Check it out!

Greg over at Creative Commons blog points out that: “The Art of Community isn’t just written for current or would-be community managers. It outlines and discusses all of the issues that are pertinent to simply working with a dispersed community of contributors.”

Honor the Jono by buying a copy! Honor the Jono and CC by translating the book and spreading the community love!

September 21, 2009 09:38 PM

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels Announced

[ Photo by-sa Andy Fitzsimon ]

I’ve been holding onto this announcement for too long. Its already out on some Linux-friendly calendars, but I want to make sure all the masses know about it! I’m super excited for Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels for a renewed focus on content, content, content! This year, I plan to work more on the creative collaborative projects which will be a key part of the conference — think Blender Open Movie project, but between all the creative free and open source graphics application communities. While that surely won’t be executed on the scale of my Blender friends’ project, it will be a good start!

Also, getting this announcement out there is good overall as Alexandre and crew recently launched the large Libre Graphics World website taking a close look at the software and communities behind Libre Graphics Meeting. And, important to get the announcement spread around the world since Jon Cruz from Inkscape is planning a Libre Graphics Day at LinuxConf.au in New Zealand in January 2010.

Please help spread the announcement, please translate it into your language on the Create wiki or by posting it to your website in the language which will help the most people read about the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels!

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels Announced

GLOBAL - August 22, 2009 - Cutting edge graphics software meets
free culture at Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels

Users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source graphics software
will meet in Brussels, Belgium on May 26-29, 2010 at the fifth annual
Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). Held in a historical piano factory,
newly renovated into a lively exhibition and work space near Brussels'
city center, LGM 2010 offers software developers, artists, designers and
other graphics professionals the chance to collaborate and learn from each
other. LGM emphasizes the sharing of collective creativity, innovation
and ideas and is free for everyone to attend. The LGM community is
excited for the opportunity to bring this event to the European capital.

About the Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts
behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Since 2006, this
annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and
supporters of projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus,
Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to
work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior
LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color
management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common formats.

Face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to
users and developers alike; in the form of tutorials, talks, workshops,
and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) the event offers many formal and informal
opportunities to interact.

Highlights from LGM 2009

The last Libre Graphics Meeting took place in Montreal, Canada. It
involved 150+ participants from around the world working together for
four days to give presentations, demos, and meet informally. Through
support from the École Polytechnique Montréal, the LGM user community
(raising money on pledgie.com), Sourceforge, River Valley Technologies,
Intel Communities, Open Candy, QT, sK1, GIMP, Python Software Foundation,
Gnome foundation and Group Eyrolles, the conference funded travel
for many international developers whom otherwise would not be able
to work face to face. Highlights included contributions by companies
building on Open Source such as AscenderCorp and Open Source Publishing,
and presentations of Jeff Fortin’s PiTiVi Video Editor, FontMatrix,
Phatch and Michael Terry’s work on In-Gimp user-experience analysis
and kinetic templates. All major projects in attendance, Scribus, Gimp,
Inkscape, and Open Font Library, spent time planning activities for the
next year. New projects like the panorama stitcher NONA, Lighttwist, a
system for running multi-projector immersive video displays, and Markus
Weiland's FacetZoom widget, set the stage for new exciting software
developments leading into LGM 2010 in Brussels.

A Preview of LGM 2010

For Libre Graphics Meeting 2010, the conference promoters challenge
all participating projects and people to set goals and plan creative
projects. First, each major project is requested to have set three solid
priorities before the conference to work towards. Second, one or more
collaborative projects is to be developed, beyond just the tools used,
such as a book or animation. And third, the conference hopes to involve
an increasing number of artists and academics to show novel uses libre
graphics software, and to discuss, analyse and provide inspiration.

In the coming months, Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 organizers will
release more information about the upcoming conference, raising funds to
enable the event, and release the official call for participation for
2010. Immediately, the conference organizers invite all interested in
participating to watch the http://libregraphicsmeeting.org website and
join the Create Project (http://create.freedesktop.org) mailing list
and get involved.

LGM 2010 is hosted by the Libre Graphics Community and Constant in
collaboration with De Pianofabriek, Master Networked Media and Research
programme Communication in a Digital Age (Piet Zwart Institute, Willem
de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam) and the Bruxelles Linux User Group (BXLUG).

For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org

Press Contact

* Sponsoring Organization: Create Project and Libre Graphics Meeting
* Contact: Jon Phillips
* Contact email: jon@rejon.org
* Phone (USA): +1.415.830.3884
* Website: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/
* Press Release in other languages: http://ur1.ca/a33b
* Press Photos: http://ur1.ca/a34y

###

August 22, 2009 11:39 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Minduka’s Notebook

We are really getting into photo-realistic clip art. Maybe its the world being flooded with iPhones or loads of movies like Terminator 4 and Transformers that show off some new concepts in glassy interfaces. Regardless, Minduka has his eyes set on making some quality clip art.

Also, Minduka made a nice image of a Present. With Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), since I’m an admin, I’m able to help cleanup Minduka’s file. When he uploaded it, he did not set the document boundary correctly. We hope that all types of people will upload content, so please keep uploading. However, every once and a while special people come to the Open Clip Art Library who want help fix these issues. We call these awesome people, Librarians. If you want to be one, please do join our mailing list and we can show you how.

I fixed the following image, uploaded the file again and then created a thumbnail of his work for this blog post and the OCAL website. Fixed!

Clip Art of the Week is brought to you by Worldlabel.com, a maker of labels for laser and inkjet printing.

June 24, 2009 10:32 AM

Clip Art of the Week: Jeronimo’s Dice and Other Photo-Realistic Art

Jeronimo is cranking out high quality photo-realistic clip art which is highly usable from everything from T-Shirts, labels, postcards, and compositions. Since the clip art is freely usable, you can use it on your own business card design or website.

Jeronimo just uploaded the above Globe, seemingly inspired by the recent praise for his uploads. There are many globes as well at Open Clip Art Library.

And, my personal favorite work of Jeronimo’s is his Audio Tape, which some of you kind readers might not even remember at all!

As with each Clip Art of the Week, I am most eager to encourage you to contribute to the Open Clip Art Library. Right now, behind the scenes, several people are working on the next version of the website which includes thumbnails, an advanced (but clean) user interface, and an easier process for contributing. If you’d like to help out, please join the discussion!

June 05, 2009 06:52 PM

More Reviews and The Ultra Wide Views Exhibition at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

The Ultra Wide Views Exhibition at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 from Yuval Levy on Vimeo.

The making of the first Ultra Wide Views Exhibition for Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montréal, Canada. High resolution large format giclées; a high resolution 360° panoramic display projecting still images, 3D (anaglyph) panorama and movies with ambiophonic sound; an experimental projectors array.

Thanks to Yuval on this cool “making of video.” I really had some good talks with Yuval about making LGM2010 more sustainable and more focused on content rather than just tools, aka bikeshed making. He read over my review, and now please check out his much more complete review of LGM2009, including his todo for 2010:

To do for LGM2010

• Decide on the venue ASAP. This is the single most important issue on the critical path to leading to LGM2010. The discussion on the mailing list seems to have fade out?
• Reach out to the general public! Ginger Coons suggested tupperware parties? Let’s show schoolkids that they need not pirate software to be creative. Let’s share our creations with the general public. Let’s get the media buzz going. Concentrate a few speeches geared at the general public on the Saturday. Make the exhibition last longer than the conference, with the conference being its culminating point. Entice the general public to learn about free graphics.
• Keep the buzz going – my feeling is that there is not enough going on in between conferences. I’d like to see more activity on the mailing list. We need more fund raising in these difficult times.

May 27, 2009 06:48 AM

Creating in the Cloud Video at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Dave Crossland at LGM2009 in Montreal. More photos coming soon Alexandre says!

LGM2009 went quite well! I met some very interesting people and generally had a feeling of excitement while there. I initially felt as if our open source graphics community had entered a period of tool and bike shed making. Thus, I sounded the cry: what is the priority for Libre Graphics Meeting now, more specifically for each of our projects, and for the overall community? Are we just making tools and creating more and more features, — better shovels, hammers and chainsaws — or do we have a collective strategy which is measurable from year to year. And, what about the content or quality of art vs. just graphics, being produced with our applications?

One cool guy I met is Kaveh, whose company handles three major scientific publishing companies through his company in India. This guy really represents what I’m interested in in FLOSS now, which is self-sustaining projects along the lines of the great work Ton and Blender Community has done. How can we all learn from the world of business to power our fun open source projects?

All throughout the conference, Kaveh made professional recordings of the presentations that synced the video and slides of presenters and immediately posted them to one of his company websites, River Valley.

Here is a link to my video.

Here is my list of top three favorite outcomes from LGM2009:

1. Participation by Companies built on Open Source (River-Valley and AscenderCorp), and OSP
2. Jeff Fortin’s PiTiVi Video Editor Presentation (This project is growing now! Great! We need a great Open Source Video Editor!)
3. Michael Terry’s Presentations on In-Gimp and Adaptive UI’s and his Lightning Talk about Kinetic Templates

Here is what I hope for LGM2010:

1. Each Project to have 3 Solid Priorities BEFORE LGM2010
2. Collaborative Project Focused On Content, and NOT Tool Building. I have great hope that if OSP leads this and we do LGM2010 in Brussels, then we will have a great content-based outcome, which will power development on tools.
3. Involve more Artists and Academics

I’m excited to hear from others about their thoughts about LGM2009, what worked, what didn’t, and what to do for LGM2010. What did you take away and/or add to LGM2009?

May 18, 2009 08:49 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Hrum’s Red Flower and More

The last post focused on Anonymous Clip Art submissions, for this Clip Art of the Week, let’s feature the new work of Open Clip Art Library contributor, Hrum, particularly Red Flower which highlights the current theme at Open Clip Art Library — spring!

Other great selections are the vector traced and tweaked, bottle below, and the celtic ornament which is useful for generating cards and letterhead. Also, if you visit Hrum’s artist page you can find more ornaments and borders which anyone may use freely for making cards, or a border for a letter.

And more recently, Hrum is creating photorealistic images like this trashcan.

Regardless, there is much more that Hrum is submitting. Please head over, register at Open Clip Art Library, and leave some reviews on the work that Hrum and others are doing at Open Clip Art Library!

May 14, 2009 08:57 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Anonymous Clip Arts

One of the solutions to our constant need for developers, is that instead of importing our old collection of clip art algorithmically, on Open Clip Art Library, librarians such as Johnny Automatic, Chovynz, Darth Gimp and others have been helping to clean, manually upload, and tag files for the refreshed Open Clip Art Library.

For this week, I want to feature their work on uploading public domain clip arts from the old system such as these AIGA standard images like this heliport:

If your clip art is uploaded as the anonymous user on Open Clip Art Library, please do contact the Anonymous author to get the clipart added to your account on the new Open Clip Art Library engine. For this week, please do applaud all those who are helping upload old cliparts to the anonymous account to help move us towards our goal of 12,000 clip art uploads this month!

UPDATE: As pointed out, praise Papapishu who has contributed so much to these efforts!

April 24, 2009 08:01 AM

Clip Art of the Week: Sunflower by Mokush

When we released Open Clip Art Library 0.19 last week, the amazing importance of getting back on track with monthly releases cannot be undervalued. As such, we hit a goal of 10,000 pieces of clip art uploaded to our new system. For April we are shooting to get 12,000 total pieces. Right now on April 10, we have 10,540 pieces!

And, for the month of April we challenged the community to upload images related to spring. Mokush hit this one on the head with the lovely sunflower. Please use it freely in your compositions, on labels, on stationary and anywhere you see fit.

Please help us as well grow the project to 12,000 pieces, all which will be included in the upcoming 0.20 Open Clip Art Library packaged release, news written about, and publicized at the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal.

April 10, 2009 04:18 AM

Clip Art of the Week: Boobaloo’s Onion + OCAL10K Exceeded + OCAL 0.19 Release

This is a really big week for the Open Clip Art Library! To start things off, last week we crossed the 10,000 file upload with the clip art of the week by Boobaloo:

Also, this entire last month the Open Clip Art Library celebrated its 5th birthday! We exceeded the 10,000 file upload mark last week and currently have 10147 files uploaded! That is really great news! This has helped encourage old and new developers to the project and made our collective self-esteem much stronger.

To make this even a bigger milestone, new developer, Jochen, created the 0.19 release of clip art. We haven’t released a new package since 2005! In the past our package releases really drove growth of the project and site, and with the rejuvenated project, I’m confident this is already happening.

Please help us spread the good news about this project, link to this post, and keep contributing clip art! From this OCAL10K sprint, I already have loads of excellent new clip art to write about here coming soon.

Here is a linkable press release excerpt as well:

March 31, 2009 – Release 0.19 of Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org), containing over 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists, is now available for download and use. In celebration of this accomplishment, since OCAL’s last release happened in 2005, and March being 5th anniversary of the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), the OCAL community set a goal to achieve 10,000 uploaded pieces of vector graphics. The project achieved this with the 10,000th submission from user Boobaloo who uploaded a graphic of an onion. The project congratulates Boobaloo for uploading the 10,000th upload. Also, project congratulates all artists who have uploaded in this anniversary OCAL10K sprint.

The project congratulates Nicu who personally crossed the 500 clip art upload barrier and now has 696 pieces of clip art uploaded to the system. All efforts towards the OCAL10K goal helped boost the site’s registrations and focus on releasing monthly packages once more to make this project a flowing river of clip art uploads. Since all contributions to the project are released into the public domain via the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, anyone may use the Open Clip Art Library files for any use including collections, to make money, and to generate compositions. However, the community encourages anyone who uses the clip art to provide attribution back to the original clip art in the form of a link or to announce the use of the clip art in some form.

For the month of April in lead up to the annual Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, May 5-9, 2009, the Open Clip Art Library is setting a goal to achieve 12,000 pieces of uploaded clip art related to spring time, release the 0.20 package of clip art, and to update the site’s software to ccHost 5. The projects asks all who are software developers comfortable with PHP and MYSQL, to consider joining the project now ti help with three critical tasks of adding rendered thumbnails, update the site software to ccHost 5, and to help roll-out our latest software theme.

Continue onward to read the highlights and to grab the new packages of all of our clip art!

March 31, 2009 05:43 AM

Open Clip Art Library Release 0.19 Announcement and OCAL10K Goal Exceeeded

March 31, 2009 – Release 0.19 of Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org), containing over 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists, is now available for download and use. In celebration of this accomplishment, since OCAL’s last release happened in 2005, and March being 5th anniversary of the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), the OCAL community set a goal to achieve 10,000 uploaded pieces of vector graphics. The project achieved this with the 10,000th submission from user Boobaloo who uploaded a graphic of an onion. The project congratulates Boobaloo for uploading the 10,000th upload. Also, project congratulates all artists who have uploaded in this anniversary OCAL10K sprint.

The project congratulates Nicu who personally crossed the 500 clip art upload barrier and now has 696 pieces of clip art uploaded to the system. All efforts towards the OCAL10K goal helped boost the site’s registrations and focus on releasing monthly packages once more to make this project a flowing river of clip art uploads. Since all contributions to the project are released into the public domain via the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, anyone may use the Open Clip Art Library files for any use including collections, to make money, and to generate compositions. However, the community encourages anyone who uses the clip art to provide attribution back to the original clip art in the form of a link or to announce the use of the clip art in some form.

For the month of April in lead up to the annual Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, May 5-9, 2009, the Open Clip Art Library is setting a goal to achieve 12,000 pieces of uploaded clip art related to spring time, release the 0.20 package of clip art, and to update the site’s software to ccHost 5. The projects asks all who are software developers comfortable with PHP and MYSQL, to consider joining the project now ti help with three critical tasks of adding rendered thumbnails, update the site software to ccHost 5, and to help roll-out our latest software theme.

Highlight

• An offline HTML gallery to browse through the thumbnails of all clip arts
• Over 4,000 new cliparts as compared to release 0.18.
• 10,000th upload by Boobaloo: http://openclipart.org/media/files/boobaloo/11895
• Refocused Development around three critical tasks
• Call for Participation toward April goals of 12,000 uploads about spring
• Call for Participatoin towards Libre Graphics Meeting 2009
• • http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/

Downloads

• http://openclipart.org/downloads/0.19/openclipart-0.19.tar.bz2
• http://openclipart.org/downloads/0.19/openclipart-0.19.tar.gz
• http://openclipart.org/downloads/0.19/openclipart-0.19.zip

Press Kit

Logos: http://openclipart.org/media/view/media/about

10,000th Upload

All Clip Art: http://openclipart.org/media/view/media/clip_art

About Open Clip Art Library

Founded in 2004 from Inkscape, the open source drawing tool, the Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org/) aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that may be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project are placed into the Public Domain according to the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration.

Help by submitting artwork today or join the IRC channel or the mailing list to find out about e.g. web development related contributions: http://openclipart.org/discussion

For More Information: http://www.openclipart.org.

Original announcement text: Announcement 0.19.

UPDATE: There is some confusion on the 10K vs 12K. Our 10K goal is clipart into our new system. There is still some old clipart that has not been transferred to our new system, but that is in our previous packages. Also, please help us DIGG this story.

March 31, 2009 04:32 AM

Creating in the Cloud and Other Tales of Design Realidad

Here is the first pass at what I want to speak about at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009. It is a wake-up alarm to all making desktop applications. We need to be thinking about how our projects and data fit into the web-powered future. Whether or not we agree with the shift to the web is somewhat irrelevant if we want to stay relevant now into the future. As always, I’m stating this fast and early and hope to get some feedback in the comments or directly by editing the presentation proposal before I post the final up on the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 proposal system I built:

Creating in the Cloud and Other Tales of Design Realidad

The trend towards web-based applications creates a question about the future of creativity on the web. With web projects like Aviary, Scribd and Slideshare, more people than ever have access to making and sharing creations. How do our beloved desktop applications such as Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, Krita, and Blender fit into this new world wide web world order (NWWWWO)? How do our projects stay relevant in contemporary times as more users and technology move to use network services? How may we learn from the rapid development of web-based projects that don’t rely upon the ultra-long development cycles, arduous community learning curves and reliance upon cranky ingrained software development methodologies?

First, this presentation surveys the landscape of creative network services such as Aviary, DeviantArt, Scribd, and Docstoc. Then it investigates the the Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) approach to on-line network services, Autonomo.us Free Network Services most commonly licensed with the GNU Affero GPL 3.0 software license. The Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library communities are used as examples of pre-Free Network Services websites which can fit into the Autonomo.us Free Network Services definition.

This presentation is a call to arms for all FLOSS Graphics communities to think about how their applications integrate with the web, what pieces are missing, and how we can all collaborate on making a unlocked web-based graphics future.

March 29, 2009 10:33 AM

Call for Presentations Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Last week we opened the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 website for presentation submissions (along with Andy’s awesome new header graphic show above). Please submit your talk! Don’t wait until the last minute, because we need to know how much money we need to allocate for travel. We are raising funds to support travel of supported talks and developers. We are quite eager to put this conference on this year and I’m very happy to be pushing the event towards more web-based autonomo.us projects with the rejuvenated Open Clip Art Library pushing hard. Please submit your presentation proposals now.

If you can’t make it, or you use free and open source graphics tools, please help support the premiere event for free and open source graphics applications. We need your continued support! We’ve raised ~ $4000 USD towards our $15,000 goal from the community. That is 100 supportive people who have supported the conference. If you have a business or want to donate a larger sum, we have sponsorship packages as well which will give you link love and more attention from our communities.

Please spread the announcement below far and wide! You will be rewarded with respect

Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), the premiere workshop and conference for developers and enthusiasts of free software graphics, will be held May 6-9, 2009, at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

LGM invites you to share your work with the community. Topics of interest include reports on major open source graphics projects, technology previews, engineering talks, power-user techniques, graphics business best practices, and general issues such as open file formats and collaboration.

Interested projects and individuals should submit proposals for presentations, demonstrations, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions by visiting the talk submission page at the CREATE project wiki. Proposals should be at most two paragraph abstracts and should include any special technical requirements.

Individuals who already plan to attend can now register free of charge at the LGM Web site.

The call for participation ends April 1, so don’t delay!

About Libre Graphics Meeting:

For four years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has been the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of free software graphics applications. Developers from projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of brushes and other assets, and common formats.

The face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to developers, but LGM offers plenty for end users as well. Tutorials, talks, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meetings to help free software users get the most out of their applications fill out the LGM schedule, and demonstrations from artists showcase what is possible.

For more information, visit www.libregraphicsmeeting.org

To support LGM 2009’s community fundraising campaign, visit pledgie.com/campaigns/2926

March 29, 2009 04:25 AM

Mission accomplished: OCAL 10K!

The road to 10K images for the Open Clip Art Library ended today and I would say it ended successfully: in due time, March 2009, the 5th anniversary of the project and with a (shameless plug) mighty image. Time to rejoice!

...and keep the contributions flowing, do not rest on our laurels (at this very moment the counter is at 1009).

March 24, 2009 04:42 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Papapishu’s Junk Ship and Wikimedia Clips

Last week’s featured work focused on minimalism. This week’s featured Clip Art of the Week comes from Papapishu. He has taken the approach to find old pages from books that are in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons, extracts the clip art, and then converts them into vector graphics. The results are quite amazing:

The original is from Wikimedia Commons and released into the public domain.

As we are still striving towards the Open Clip Art Library 10K, taking Papapishu’s approach to adding to the collection is fabulous. We are at 9744 pieces right now with 10 days left! Please help us meet the goal by uploading your clip art!

March 21, 2009 02:12 AM

Another personal milestone in the OCAL 10K drive

Another personal milestone in the drive to 10K images for the Open Clip Art Library: I almost finished re-uploading my images from the old site to the new one (that was a painful manual effort), setting my contributions at 575 images and the total uploads to 9630 (quite close to the target).

I said almost since I have some more images that were part of the old site, some playing cards (218 images, uploading them will set he goal to almost complete), which I am not sure if and how I should upload (and have not managed to get a straight answer form anybody).

Well, this is almost all my contribution to the 10K drive (started with 420 images, got to 575), until the end of the month I may upload a handful more files (unless the playing cards will kick in), so is the time to pass the torch, who will carry it?

March 17, 2009 04:34 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Pitr’s Minimalist Food Icons

As we keep growing and striding beyond 9530 pieces of clip art towards the 10,000 clip art mark submitted to the Open Clip Art Library, the quality of submissions keeps increasing.

For this week, I am highlighting the minimal works of Pitr.

One image I really appreciate is of Pitr’s watermelon:

This image is a reworked version of Machovka’s Watermelon:

The point is that Open Clip Art Library allows you to remix other people’s clip art and show the relationship between clip art files uploaded. Towards the Open Clip Art Library 10K during this month’s 5th anniversary of Open Clip Art Library, remixing clip art is a great way to help us meet our goal!

March 12, 2009 02:18 AM

Congrats Nicu Towards Open Clip Art Library 10K!

Nicu hit a high-score of 500 clip art uploads! Massive congratulations to him and to all, keep them flowing. Nicu wrote:

I have in the queue some more re-uploads, about 75 images, so the increase can be notable in the following days if I will got the time (and also reinforcing my rank), but there is no way in hell I would try do displace John Olsen, with his mighty 2016 uploads, from the top spot.

Friendly competition is a good thing in the #ocal10K I took the Nicu-Automatic challenge and uploaded some people and a nice distortion I created from some pictures of shredded paper in prep for the shredder event:

BTW, Nicu created my vector head icon. Nicu, I need a little reJon character I can use places as an update to my vectorhead icon You know which one, right?

March 10, 2009 09:18 PM

Towards 10K: my 500-th image

On the drive to 10K images for the Open Clip Art Library, with all its nasty bumpings, I reached a personal milestone: my 500-th clipart uploaded.

It is not by any means an artistic achievement, is just a re-upload from the old site and it is an image I made (but never used) for another project and re-purposed it to the library a few years ago. But is a round number and a good opportunity to rejoice.

I have in the queue some more re-uploads, about 75 images, so the increase can be notable in the following days if I will got the time (and also reinforcing my rank), but there is no way in hell I would try do displace John Olsen, with his mighty 2016 uploads, from the top spot.

March 09, 2009 06:37 PM

Please Continue Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 Support

Yes, the economy is not very good, but we are more determined than ever to put on the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 this year in Montreal. Its the main time that all your favorite Free and Open Source Graphics Software teams are able to come together to accelerate collaboration and development in person.

We need your support! And to show this support, we have been asking for your support in the three following ways (as described in my last post):

• Donate to Sponsor Developer Travel via our Pledgie Campaign
• Blog about this campaign on your site(s)
• Put the following pledgie drive button on your site(s) for the duration of the campaign

Support LGM 2009

There are already several in the community who are supporting our cause such as Bennis Welt who said, “I’d be happy if my readers would donate to this cause when using any open source graphic programs. 5, 10, 15$ or more are very appreciated.” In German he said, “Ich würde mich freuen, wenn dies viele meiner Leser, die Open Source Grafikprogramme einsetzen, tun, seien es 5, 10 oder 15$, jeder Betrag ist willkommen und wird dringend benötigt.”

Supporting Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 promotes international development. In Poland, MMIIC posted a call for donations on the Polish Gimp Forums. And, super-supporter Valessio from Brazil posted the announcement to www.InkscapeBrasil.org, http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/InkscapeBrasil/Noticia20090306012705, http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Scribus, http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/LGM and his own blog: http://valessiobrito.info.

Please support Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 and let us know when you help spread the news!

March 07, 2009 10:10 PM

The road to 10000 or CC0 only over my cold, dead body

After a few days ago I was so excited about the drive to 10K images at the Open Clip Art Library I figured is the time to put my work where my mouth is, and planned a large contribution when I got disturbed by a talk about moveing away from the Public Domain dedication and towards a Creative Commons travesty, a move I am highly opposing to.

I was very close to to what I do when I am very unhappy about something: go ballistic, burn the crops and poison the wells. And nuke and the bridges. I think I have extensive experience in the area and can be pretty effective doing it. But having a busy day I didn't got time for that, instead I had the time to think more, cool down and come with a second strategy: consolidate my position as the second largest contributor by counting the number of uploads to have a bigger soapbox when/if the proverbial matter will hit the fan.

And as I rarely take the middle ground, my first contribution in this drive to 10K was a batch of 44 new images (new as images never published to OCAL so far, I still have a bunch to import from the old website so a lot of aces are in my sleeve).

PS: the illustration for this post was prepared with an experimental Inkscape devel build for F10, generously provided in addition to the Rawhide package by our mighty packager.

March 06, 2009 03:00 PM

Clip Art of the Week: Remi’s Champagne Anyone?

When prepping last week’s Clip Art of the Week, I discovered the glossy clip art of Remi. He has done some really amazing work such as the following:

All of his clip art submissions are super-high quality! I would love to receive images showing people and businesses using this clip art on billboards, airplanes, in books, or anywhere you can use these images, since they are all released into the public domain!

I bring up Remi’s awesome clip art this week to also highlight that this entire month is the 5 year anniversary of the Open Clip Art Library. To celebrate the project’s birthday en route to the big Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, we are aiming big to cross the 10,000 pieces of clip art submitted to the collection. Please help us reach this goal now by contributing your clip art! And, if you’ve used this clip art in great ways, please submit an image showing how you have used the clip art.

March 06, 2009 07:41 AM

The Create Project Refreshed

On the way towards raising $15K for Libre Graphics Meeting, with the help of the super awesome Robert Martinez, I refreshed the Create Project main website with a new logo and rapidly developed designed. We never did a complete launch of the Create Project, and never had a logo. So, lets consider this the next launch launch launch (please write news stories about this project and Libre Graphics Meeting .

I also updated the text on the front of the site which says what we are doing with the project space:

We catalyze communication and sharing between Free and Open Source creative software communities like Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, Open Clip Art library, Open Font Library and more. We do Libre Graphics Meeting and share Specifications. Join our Mailing List, use the Wiki, or chat at #create on irc.freenode.net.

If your project is not represented here, and you do free and open source creative software (audio, video, image and text), you are interested in collaboration and sharing, and you want it to be part of this project please do comment on this thread. Also, if you are into this theme and project, you can check out the design and other documents in the new OSUOSL powered SVN module.

Create is pushing a few specifications right now such as:

• Shared resources v0.1.0.
• Swatches – colour file format
• Colour management Standards at ColourWiki with some overlapping areas [1]
• Icon set specification from Tango project
• User interaction implementations
• OpenRaster – general multilayered bitmap exchange format
• Open Color Standard – free ourselves from the grip of pantone!
• Non-destructive images processing and photo management
• Unified plug-in API for processing raster graphics
• Conference The Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 planning page (and for past LGMs)
• Conference_2009 The Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 planning page
• ResourceTagging – ways to integrate resource tagging into applications.

The project is open to all types of involvement. Also, if your apps isn’t free and open, feel free to participate as well in development community specs the FreeDesktop.org way! Oh, and if you didn’t look, everything on the wiki is CC BY-SA licensed.

March 04, 2009 08:34 PM

Towards Open Clip Art Library 10K

Open Clip Art Library is trying to hit the 10,000 clip art in our new system mark. While this number might not be huge in the modern User Generated Content space, the quality of the collection, and considering our old collection is about 10K in size already, its a good happy number that is growing at a regular pace.

This is our push for this month, on the path towards Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, to get more clip art, more users, and have fun while doing it. So, please jump in an submit clip art. If something bugs you about the site, or project, get on the roadmap, develop the project software, and join our communication channels.

Nicu is on-board. Are you?

But now a couple of things are aligned and the Open Clip Art Library deserves a share of the spotlight:

First, the number of images uploaded at this very moment is 9,323, very close to a round 10,000 (yeah, we still have some thousands not yet imported from the old site, but only those are easily reachable).

Second, the project was launched in March 2004, so this month will mark its 5 years anniversary.

Putting those two next to each other, the conclusion is very tempting: a joined effort to hit the 10,000 images milestone until the end of March 2009. I’m in, how about you?

I’m doing my part with clip art of the week posts. If so help by submitting your SVG clip art, help develop the site, or blog about this to spread the word! Its the month of clip art towards 10K, oh, and the 5 year anniversary for the project! Happy clip art renewing

Also, we have some other fun things brewing right now on the project behind the scenes which hopefully will be announced in the coming days.

I’m also tagging this push as a couple of my daily ideas, which I still haven’t made an announcement about: http://rejon.org/wiki/IDEA_20090304_Open_Clip_Art_Library_Release_Roadmap and http://rejon.org/wiki/IDEA_20090303_Open_Clip_Art_Library_10K.

March 03, 2009 07:46 PM

Openclipart.org: aiming for 10K images

After a couple of relatively highly popular successes (map elements and pac-man, remember?), in the last year I was pretty much inactive at openclipart.org, as what I had on the TODO was boring and frustrating: re-upload images from the old site on the current one, with an awful interface and important core features missing.

But now a couple of things are aligned and the Open Clip Art Library deserves a share of the spotlight:

First, the number of images uploaded at this very moment is 9,323, very close to a round 10,000 (yeah, we still have some thousands not yet imported from the old site, but only those are easily reachable).

Second, the project was launched in March 2004, so this month will mark its 5 years anniversary.

Putting those two next to each other, the conclusion is very tempting: a joined effort to hit the 10,000 images milestone until the end of March 2009. I'm in, how about you?

With the current upload rate, it may take 2 or 3 more months to reach the 10,000 target, so an effort, not a big one, is needed. We can do it, but only with contributor's help. When I will get some time I will upload at least 10-20 images on my own, most likely more.

March 02, 2009 08:54 AM