It is the least I could do; downloading this PDF and printing out the first three pages is the least you can do.
I made it in the free and open source LibreOffice program, using the fonts Cantarell Extra Bold (originally designed by Dave Crossland) and Dobkin Script (by Dieter Steffman), they are free to install for such personal use. I filled in the ‘v’ in “Lives” using the free and open source Inkscape program.
2021-11 update: I put it online, why not?
Why hide my work on the 3-millionth most popular blog on the web where no one will see it? Since I’m giving it away I might as well store and version the files publicly, so I hid it among 200 million other repositories on GitHub, at https://github.com/skierpage/BlackLivesMatter_poster. I even filed a bug (called “issue” on GitHub) that the T-E-R in “MATTER” is murky and hard to read when printed out.
Open source code art
Before doing this I searched for “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM” on GitHub to see how others did it. I found one project with a few enormous photos of protests, another mysterious piece of code with no explanation of what it does, and a promising-sounding but completely empty sk88888888ordie/BLM-Posters project. I assume artists mostly share digital works on other sites such as DeviantArt (I always found that name sketchy). Artwork, even digital, isn’t really like code, so GitHub doesn’t make it easy to indicate “This project is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.”
Git Yer Crypto Art!
The NFT (non-fungible token, with extra-sparkly blockchain goodness) for this artwork is available for one meeelyun dolars. You can own a nearly meaningless unit of data that proves… that you spent a lot of money for something that might be tangentially related to a freely available digital file. Operators are standing by!
