"know the speaker"

Please give a brief introduction of yourself?

I am Hiran Venugopalan. I am from Kerala, and have been active in the promotion of Free Software in Kerala. I am a designer, typographer, usability/ accessibility expert, and a front end designer. I had contributed to the Malayalam Localisation and Computing Community – SMC and other various project. Currently I am looking more on the Usability and Interface Designs and is working as a freelancer in those topics for the last half year, after completing my BTech, and is now running behind my dream to make it a firm that provides the same services.

What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

Well, as projects I had contributed to Swathathra Malayalam Computing, was a GSoC participant for the same in year 2007. I had also designed a pair of fonts by my own, namely Perizia and Rufscript. Also have worked along with various other GPLed fonts like Dyuthi, Reghu, Lohit, Smayak and GNU Freefont. And have contributed to the FOSS communities as a designer – by designing posters and logos and such things, that ranges from GPLv3 conference of 2006 to the Bluebream logo I did a some weeks ago.

What will your workshop be, exactly ?

I am doing a four hour workshop, for beginners that provides them an introduction on how to use Inkscape for designing purposes. Starting with a bit of history, and idea about the Vector graphics the workshop introduces the tools that inkscape has, and provides them an idea on how to use what to make things, which will be followed by deconstruction of some of my works.

The second one is a talk, that provides the basic idea of what exactly a font is, and how they are designed, and how to make it ONLY using free software, as I had made those fonts. The session also provides a brief idea about developing Indic language fonts. And my experiences and suggestions.

What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this talk? What do you expect ?

Three things. Audience should know that there are designing tools in FOSS. Audience should feel that they are capable to replace there daily using designing tools and become confidence to make a trial on Inkscape. Some should come forward telling his interest in developing a font for his language that I dont know to read!

What kind of design work you do ?

It ranges from web layouts, general graphic designs like posters, brochures, logos and visiting cards. I use Inkscape to do these works. Other tools that I use include GIMP, Imagemagik, Fontforge (font designing) and Scribus. Currently I am more concentrating on web layout designing, and logo designing and typography.

While FOSS has some awesome tools for designing, why do you think most open source applications lag behind in terms of look and feel, wow factor and user friendliness ?

Well, that is changing. Neither the GNU Project or Linux Kernel project where started meant to be for a PC usage. Now they are getting to common people. Machines with GNU Linux is becoming popular in homes and We are improving alot.

Dont say we are not behind designs, the improvement that our projects had, for example the change that KDE had in last 2 years is amazing when compared to UI improvements that ‘the most used OS’ interface had. Also I am having a huge expectation over the GNOME 3 Design.

Also the wow factor, is clearly more in GNU Linux these days. I still remember a dozen of incidence where people where really amazed by watching the Compiz fusion!

What tips will you give to developer working on UI of FOSS applications ? How can they improve ?

I am still young to provide tips to ‘developers’. Well, in my coder-cum-designer, the advice to newbie’s in the case of web development is “Know the standard, Follow those standards, Do Hand code, and Do Hate IE6!”

What according to you are the most usable FOSS software ?

Well! That is a complex question to answer. It depends on the user and user need. In my early days of web development, I was a core fan of Filezilla for FTP, now I prefer command line. So it depends on each users and there exact need and the amount of time that they spend for doing thing and how many number of times the same process in repeated.

Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

I had no luck yet to attend any previous gnunify editions, and and is longing to be part of that event this time. it is so privilege for me to be a speaker there!