About

Libre Arts was previously known under the name Libre Graphics World. It’s an online magazine for creative professionals using free applications for digital painting, graphic and web design, desktop publishing, photography, and CAD. The project focuses on news, tutorials and articles to provide you with the most up to date information about evolution of these applications and best practices.

Free software is a rapidly evolving niche, we feel that this fact should be better represented on the web which is exactly what we do. In many ways foundation of this project was triggered by Ginger Coons’s talk “Ownership and Standards: Why Designers are Slow to Adopt Open Source” at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

We sometimes (seldom, really) cover selected proprietary software that works on Linux, if it’s interesting enough, has no direct free software alternative, and/or its developers contribute to free/libre software. A perfect example would be Harrison Consoles’ Mixbus which is a fork of Ardour digital adio workstation, with developers contributing to Ardour in both code and money.

Why rebranding

Initially, Libre Graphics World was intended to cover just the graphics part of digital content creation software. The idea was that the community would take care of the rest, both audio and video.

Despite some community attempts (some of them extremely promising), the expectation fell short. So we had to take matters into out own hands. This, however, led to some confusion because the project’s name had a narrower scope. Hence the rebranding into Libre Arts. There’s a dedicated post with more details.

Contacts

We are interested to hear from you what topics you would us to cover next, what new interesting applications we missed, what excellent work was done using free software.

There are different ways to get in touch with us. First of all, you can email. We also actively maintain a Twitter account where we post interesting things related to free software that don’t qualify for a full-fledged article.

The team

The project was founded and is currently managed by Alexandre Prokoudine who is affiliated with several free/libre projects such as GIMP and Ardour.

The new website was made possible thanks to the PIXLS.US team:

Former contributors:

  • Maxim Barabash, web programming. Contributor to sK1, PrintDesign, UniConvertor. Twitter: @Maxim_Barabash
  • Vera Lobacheva, web programming. Contributor to Open Clip Art Library. Twitter: @summerstyle

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all the content is available under CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to translate and publish it, but please name the original author and link back to the original.