Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts
a note on the design of this publication
As the vocabulary of collective arts is intersecting many fields of knowledge that cannot be easily confined to separate categories, terms also spill over into other definitions and other chapter themes. The design of this publication accommodates non-linear reading, without compromising orientation. That is, cross-references are indicated with seven different kinds of arrows, referring to one of the seven chapter themes. The arrows occur on the chapter introduction pages, next to the respective terms, as well as in the side bar navigation of the respective chapter categories. This allows the reader to quickly sift through the book and find terms in different contexts. In addition, elements in the side bar navigation subtly poke out when indicating the occurrence of a term in the text.
The design of this book is part of an ongoing collective exploration into unusual, non-proprietary, open-source, free and libre publishing tools and workflows. Such tools come with their own quirks and ask us to re-think and re-shuffle design priorities. For instance, when it comes to detail typography—the perfect line break or kerning, we had to make concessions in this publication. Still, by putting into practice different tool-designer scenarios we hope to contribute to a growing community of designers who consider it relevant to rethink their tool-ecologies. Building on the knowledge and practices of many designers and collectives that work with and contribute to open-source approaches to designing on and offline publications,[1] Hackers & Designers’ publishing experiments intersect computer programming, art, and design, and involve the building of self-made, hacked, and reappropriated tools and technical infrastructures, which sometimes results in books, such as the one you are holding now.
Following open-source principles, the tool ecosystem that evolved around the design of this publication is documented and published on the H&D website[2] and git repository[3] under the CC4r license,[4] providing the possibility of continuation in other contexts, studying, critiquing, and repurposing.
The tools ecosystem includes: MediaWiki, Jinja templating, Pagedjs for the layout, and Scribus & Gimp for image retouching and cover design.
All typefaces used in this publication are available at ‘Badass Libre Fonts By Womxn’,[5] a repository of open source and/or libre typefaces composed by Loraine Furter.
Fonts used: Ortica designed by Benedetta Bovani, Authentic Sans designed by by Christina Janus and Desmond Wong, and Combine designed by Julie Patard.
[1] Collectives that inspire us in our design experiments are Varia, Constant Association for Art and Media, Open Source Publishing, the practices and knowledge deriving from educational contexts such as the student-led interdepartmental initiative PUB at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam or XPUB—a master programme of Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute, the digital and hybrid publishing research groups of the Institute of Network Cultures. Concretely, the technical infrastructure and workflow used to create this publication (wiki-to-pdf) is building on the code repositories of Martino Morandi (Constant Association for Art and Media) developed for the publication ‘Infrastructural Interactions’ edited by TITiPI (Helen V Pritchard, Femke Snelting) (gitlab.constantvzw.org/titipi
/wiki-to-pdf), and Manetta Berends (Varia Collective) developed for the publication Volumetric Regimes edited by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), published under the CC4r license (git.vvvvvvaria.org
/mb/volumetric-regimes-book).
[2] hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools.
[3] github.com/hackersanddesigners.
[4] constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html.
[5] design-research.be/by-womxn.