Last week we organized a local Ubuntu conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which we plan on making it a regional conference from now on thanks to the help from our friends in the Uruguay LoCo. The conference was great but by far what stayed with me was a talk and some subsequent conversations with Guillermo Espertino about how a new-ish and small group of designers that used open source software to design professionally had gotten together and started a community called Gráfica Libre. These guys, individually do some very amazing things. As a group they’ve blown my mind  🙂

These are designers who are using 100% no-excuses free software on a daily basis to design and ship professional designs to customers.

These are some of the things they’ve designed as a group for the conference:

The video was edited by Guillermo Espertino and the 3D animation done by Martin Eschoyez. The blender source files are available on his website.

This was done by Lucas Romero

There’s a presentation given by Guillermo Espertino (you can see the work his company does with open source in their website http://ohweb.com.ar/) you can download it (it is in spanish, though) and it highlights the challenges they’ve faced so far in putting together designs in the open and collaboratively. They still feel they have a few iterations to go until they have a settled process, but it certainly does look like they’ve cracked the hardest part to me.