The libre designer is a utopian character, not a mandate — a device for showing another way of working, the same way a story uses a character to make an idea legible. I first gave this as a lecture in a livestream for MICA’s GD Summer Camp in July 2020 (script here), and it’s since evolved into a related, more focused talk I call A New Design Commons. Both are about the same premise: F/LOS — Free/Libre Open Source — offers designers a pragmatic way of working that also happens to revive how culture has historically been made: copied, improved on, shared back.
Libre, not gratis
“Libre design,” not “free design” — same reason the free software world insists on “free as in freedom, not free as in price.” You can still charge money for libre work. The point isn’t to give everything away for nothing; it’s to not lock someone into a tool, a format, or an ecosystem they can’t get back out of. A recipe for a design should be shareable, and so should the tools and equipment used to execute it — even if you still have to pay for the equipment, it should be yours to hack, customize, and control.
Where this started
I first got into Free/Libre Open Source in 2006, building websites with Drupal — a novel-at-the-time content management system built by people all over the world, free to download and use however I wanted. Later, thinking about design sustainability, I kept coming back to Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn and the way vernacular buildings adapt over time — which is also how F/LOS software evolves. Around the same time, running publication design projects with little to no art budget pushed me toward public domain and Creative Commons imagery out of necessity. Libre fonts, open source tools, and CC-licensed images had all been separately creeping into my practice for years before I taught a class on “Open Source Design” in 2018 and it became something I could name. I’d also been doing web work since the early 2000s with as much open source software and code as I could manage, and along the way got to spend time with people who’d shaped this world directly: David Crossland, an open source type advocate who’s worked on Google Fonts, and Eric Schrijver and Loraine Furter, two Belgian designers who write and speak a lot about open copyright and open source tools. Opening up my own work followed the same logic — lecture scripts living as repos on GitHub, photos shared on Flickr under Creative Commons licenses, rather than locked away.
How to liberate a practice
Start with the easiest, most concrete thing and work toward the hardest, most abstract one. Swapping imagery first costs nothing — any public domain or Creative Commons image works with whatever tools you already use, no new software required. Fonts are next: almost every machine already has some open source type installed, and foundries like Velvetyne and The League of Moveable Type release full source files, so a font missing a weight or a glyph can just be edited. Software is the biggest leap — Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus — tools that do the same work differently, not worse, and that keep working even if the people building them move on, because the source stays available for someone else to pick up. Hardware and OS choice (GNU/Linux, libre-hardware vendors) is the deepest end of the pool. And finally, the practice itself: share your process, including the failures; share source files, not just finished output; work in text-editable formats (SVG, XML, plaintext) that stay legible with any tool; collaborate; contribute back to the projects you rely on.
A new design commons
David Bollier defines the commons as everything we collectively own and believe we should maintain for future generations. Eleanor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning extension of that idea is that a commons isn’t just the resources themselves — it’s the self-organizing social systems that govern and preserve them. Applied to design, the commons is the fonts, images, tools, and frameworks, plus the social and technical systems for sharing and preserving them, plus the freedom to build on what came before. If design is for everyone — the way Ellen Lupton argued everyone deserves good typography — then the tools and resources for making it need to be equitably accessible too.
You don’t own the tools
In 2019, Adobe cut off Creative Cloud access in Venezuela in compliance with US sanctions. Whatever you think of the politics, it makes something plain: rented software means you don’t own your tools, and paying the rent isn’t a guarantee you keep access to them. As design educators, that’s the part that stings — we train people to depend on things a company can wall off at any point. It’s a kind of intellectual enclosure, the same shape as the historical enclosure of common land. (The New Design Commons talk this section comes from dates to around 2022, shortly after Adobe announced it was acquiring Figma — cited there as live, unfolding news. That deal has actually since fallen apart: European and UK regulators blocked it on antitrust grounds, and Adobe and Figma mutually terminated it in December 2023. But the underlying point outlives that one deal: ownership was never guaranteed in the first place.)
Reconsidering copyright
F/LOS licensing suggests a way out of the binary of “all rights reserved” versus “no rights reserved.” Creative Commons lets you say: some rights reserved, on my terms. My favorite is CC BY-SA — by-attribution-share-alike — which requires crediting the source and sharing derivative work under the same terms. It builds a kind of design bibliography: you can trace where an idea came from and where it went next, which is exactly the connective tissue a real commons needs.
Why designers don’t F/LOS
Worth being honest about the friction: fear of losing credit, pride, file-format headaches, unfamiliar tooling, a fear of “design by committee,” and — very often — the plain fact that a client needs the file in InDesign, or a team works in After Effects, and that isn’t really optional. The goal was never full adoption. My own practice still uses plenty of proprietary software; the libre designer is the character who gets to be a purist so I don’t have to be. The point is having more tools and more ways of working available to you, not replacing everything at once — and noticing how much of what counts as “good design” is just the accumulated habits of the same few programs, built by the same handful of people in the 1980s, that almost everyone still uses without question.
Further watching, reading, and trying
Talks: The Libre Designer (2020 livestream) and Garth Braithwaite’s “Designers CAN Open Source.” Reading: the Free Software Foundation’s definition of free software, and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Software worth trying: Blender (genuinely free as in both freedom and price, with an enormous tutorial ecosystem), GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus, and the command-line workhorses ImageMagick and Ghostscript. Type: Velvetyne, The League of Moveable Type, and Google Fonts (all OFL-licensed, source files included). Imagery: Openverse, Flickr Commons, and the Noun Project. Education: AIGA’s Digital Foundations, Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burroughs’s open-source-tools translation of the classic Bauhaus foundations curriculum.