Creating artwork to promote FOSS projects: it's Free Software all the way down!

The project you're working on may be Free and Open Source, and so may its technical dependencies. Are you then going to end up using a proprietary product from Adobe or Canva to promote it?

At Prav, we try to use Free Software tools and solutions wherever possible—including while designing graphics and promotional material, and selecting fonts to go with it. Having made several posters, illustrations, and other artwork for Prav, I plan to share my design process such as it is and introduce related software and tools along the way, including:

• My notebook and pencil, with which I start almost every design process

• Penpot, which is useful for collaboratively creating posters and presentations and with which some of the Prav posters were designed

• Inkscape, used for more advanced manipulation of vector images, including the Prav logo made by Raghu Kamath and modified by me for PravConf

• GIMP, which I am most familiar with and which I use to tweak scalar images including the pen/colour-pencil illustrations I have made when illustrating for Snipette magazine.

• Krita, a competitor to GIMP which has better stylus support and that I used when trying out digital-only artwork

In the interest of time, these will mostly be screenshots of the tools showcasing their main features. If hardware cooperates, I will also attempt to have a short live drawing session with Inkscape or Krita.

I will also touch upon licencing issues while reusing existing content for designs.

• Discussions about GPL, MIT, and proprietary licences may be common in the software world, but similar (though not quite identical) concerns lie with licencing artwork and fonts too

• Specifically, I will talk about the SIL Open Font Licence and a few Creative Commons licences, highlighting the point that just "Creative Commons" is not a licence: you have to specify which one!

• I'll also introduce a few places where you can get content with open licences, such as FontSquirrel and publicdomainvectors.org, as well as the filters on DuckDuckGo which allow you to find the same.

This is a beginner-friendly talk aimed at introducing people to the existence of Free Software solutions in this space as well as some of the common licencing issues to be aware of.

1. Even art and design work can be achieved using powerful Free Software tools

2. You can't just copy any image or font you want off the Internet and use it!

3. But there are places you can go and ways you can find images and fonts under a licence that allows you to freely reuse them

4. Don't get scared of a vast array of buttons; you can just learn them one by one when you need to