Alright with a small delay, here is what happened the past three days on LGM.
Day 2
28.05 was a lot about typography. The two talks that were most interesting to me were by only one person – David Crossland. His first talk was on Google’s font initiative. He is the author of one of the fonts there and it was quite interesting to hear his story. As it turns out, he was (or still is? not sure) a post-graduate typography student in some university in England. He designed the typeface Cantarell as an university project. Then he was approached by Google, offering him $6000 for the typeface to become free (as in freedom). He obviously agreed and now his typeface will probably (and hopefully) be adopted by many websites. His second talk was on how he actually created the thing – using only open source tools. Actually, only one tool – FontForge, even tho in the beginning he tried to first create the basic parts in Inkscape (but turned out that wasn’t the best approach).
Another interesting talk was on designing typefaces for African languages by Denis Moyogo Jacquerye. I never thought that they speak like 2000 languages in Africa, but as I imagined most of them are only being spoken. I was also interested to see that the langs actually combine both Latin and Arabic features in some cases.
Day 3
I got so pissed off of myself for oversleeping again and missing Jimmac‘s talk… Thankfully it was recorded, but still, it’d be great to watch that guy explaining his icon workflow. Anyway, at least I made it for Ton Roosendaal‘s talk on Blender – for which, unfortunately wasn’t enough time, so he had to rush through most of it (a technical problem in the beginning was the main reason).
I should say that I adore this guy. Not in the fanboy “OMG TON FTW!”-kind of way (believe it or not, there are a lot of true teenage fanboys in the Blender community). I just find him a very inspiring person, somebody who actually does things, makes them happen and works his ass off to achieve huge goals. A man of action, a tough guy, but also a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously – no huge ego or anything like that. The Blender Foundation (along with the Blender Institute, but it’s sponsored by the foundation and both are being ran by Ton) is one of the wealthiest Open Source foundations, but it also produces great work. More on that later. If you’re interested in Blender or why I like Ton you may want to watch this interview with him. Now just to brag a bit:
(Don’t ask me why so serious, I really don’t know ;-) The two other guys are Pablo and Soenke from the Durian team).
Speaking of the Durian team, the guys behind the third open movie, there was a workshop with four of them – the pictured above Pablo and Soenke along with Jeremy and Nathan. For the unfamiliar this means that I had the opportunity to get some advice/lessons from some of the best Blenderheads alive – which is, pretty good (look at their portfolios, google them or whatever to get an idea). Unfortunately I don’t have much knowledge and experience myself to ask some not-too-stupid questions, but they were nice enough to show us some basics (luckily everybody was just a beginner, some of the people on the workshop had never actually used Blender, so I wasn’t alone). It was quite furn, Pablo demonstrated how to model faces using… um, a reference?
For those who don’t know – in reality, one would place an image of a head in both front and side view in the background and model the 3D mesh on top. Pablo actually used Nathan’s shadow – it was quite hilarious. We really had a lot of fun and I learned a some things. Thanks, guys.
Next talks that made an impression to me were Alexandre Prokoudine‘s digital photography on Linux and Darktable. This guy is like a machine – he’s participating in like a million projects and he does great job. Multi-touch support in (Ubuntu) Linux by Steve Conklin was quite interesting and made Jeremy dream about animating on a multi-touch screen. No photos unfortunately. I missed the next talks since I had to do something else, but I was back for the Inkscape for everybody discussion/talk. Shared my Inkscape story, acted a bit goofy telling them I miss a native Mac version. I think after this talk we took a group photo of a lot of people who attended (certainly not everybody – some people were gone somewhere, some didnt want to be in the photo, etc). No idea where to get it, but I’ll find out soon.
Finally at 20:30 the fun begun – a sneak peek at Sintel – the third open movie (aka project Durian). I really hope there is a recording for that one since it was truly hilarious in the beginning – Nathan made the crowd to “woo” and “boo”, asked.. heh, interesting questions, etc, lots of laughing. You should see it, I’ll post a link when the talk is online. Then they actually showed parts of the movie, explained the process of creating it – technical stuff, not so technical, etc. It was really, really interesting and I have to tell you – that short movie is really professionally made, despite the low budget. Really great stuff. They expect it to be ready for SIGGRAPH, which is in the end of July.
Then we went to two pubs, had some good time until… uh, four in the morning. Nathan turned out to be very cool person, we talked quite a lot (on very geeky and not so geeky topics, even stuff like feminism), walked around to find a cathedral (no idea what it’s name is), went back to the pub, etc. It was pretty cool. We both agreed that Brussels has an unique atmosphere and feels somehow at home. Even for an American, which is quite interesting.
Pictured: happiness
We were with the MyPaint developers, here is a picture of me with Martin Renold:
I look quite creepy on this one…
Anyway. After almost no sleep I got to the final LGM day today. Few short talks and discussions (the most interesting one – where is the next LGM going to be, its not decided yet but my bet is Asia), lots of thankyous, applause, woo’s, hugs and so on.
Until finally, here I am in the hotel. Last night in Brussels… I’ll certainly miss it. LGM was truly a great experience – met lots of cool people, some of which I never thought I’d meet. Learned tons of new things and not related only to technology or design at all. A huge thank you for the staff and everybody who was there.
And a small suggestion to the organizers of the next meeting: for Christ’s sake, no vegan/vegetarian-only meals! :P
