Olivetti advertisements: overprint, tile field, code mosaic, mosaic as flow

What it is, and who made it

1. "De A à Z" (French): a giant A crossed by Z strokes in translucent inks.
2. Divisumma, signed by Herbert Bayer: ribbons of numbered colour tiles curling over a grey checker sheet.
3. Divisumma 26: a hexagon filled with the digit string 1234567890 in three face colours on black.
4. Elettrosumma 22: an isometric field of blocks with scattered digits.

Parts, layer by layer

1. De A à Z. Paper #fcf7eb. Inks measured alone: red #eb4324, cyan #04b2dd, yellow #fcc603, green #07ac3d, black #1a1b22. Every overlap is darker than both inks: transparent overprint. Ideal multiply gets lightness, misses hue by 14 to 21. Type: one A and parts of Z as flat planes; French body copy in a slab serif.

2. Elettrosumma 22. Edge-orientation peaks 35° and 143° (secondary 44°, 152°) from horizontal: steeper than isometric 30° (inferred dimetric, hand-drawn). Faces by area: coloured tops 0.235, light-grey sides 0.445, mid-grey sides 0.118, black 0.066, paper 0.134; light to mid side ratio 3.8 to 1. Eight top inks (observed). Single bold digits in the gaps.

3. Divisumma 26. Faces: pink, white, ochre on black. Line pitch 20 px of 1972 in the white face (autocorrelation 0.91); 19 px in the pink. Glyph advance about 12 px (weak, 0.51). Face boundaries near 127° to 145°. The string breaks: '13345' for '12345' in at least two lines (observed).

4. Bayer, Divisumma. Class shares: paper 0.19, light grey 0.28, mid grey 0.09, dark grey 0.04, black 0.20, colour 0.19. The S ribbon's bottom edge curvature runs +0.0087 to −0.0059 per px with an inflection near x 800; tightest radius 115 px (about 8% of the width); apparent height 92 to 399 px. Tile widths 88 to 89 px in the flat row and 26 to 47 px where the ribbon turns. Black teardrops fill the curls. Operators and digits ride the tiles and float on the grid.

The framework behind it

One framework seen three ways. Mosaic is the discretisation (blocks, glyph cells, tiles). Overprint is the optics: each ink a sheet with a transmission; overlap the product. Flow is the motion: tiles carried by a bending surface, the flow made visible by how tiles foreshorten. The fourth sheet adds error as grain: the misprinted digit proves the field is text.

The same idea in distant fields

• Printing: CMYK overprint and trapping; the multiply blend mode in every compositor is the ideal case of image 1.
• Crystallography: isometric block fields are the projection of a cubic lattice; the side-face shading is a one-light Lambert model.
• Typesetting and early computing: fill patterns of repeated digits were how line printers made images (ASCII and typewriter art).
• Fluid dynamics: Bayer's ribbon is a material line in a flow; its stretching and folding is how mixing is drawn (a Lagrangian view).
• Textiles: woven ribbons with printed motifs that turn over show both faces, as the black teardrops do.

Dual edge

Mosaic as flow makes numbers look alive and friendly: Olivetti sold calculators with it. The same move can make figures look more orderly than the data behind them. Overprint can hide one layer inside another; a reading surface must keep each sheet separable. Copying Olivetti or Bayer forms directly would be a literal copy; the canon asks for the framework, not the look.

Measured

Concepts

• advection
• archive memory
• block cube
• body
• chance order
• checking as craft
• code
• data
• error as texture
• field
• glass
• glitch datamosh
• glyph cell
• grain texture
• grid
• horizon
• identity name
• ink
• law beer absorption
• law overprint absorption
• layering
• light
• light direction
• line hatching
• loop cycle
• mixing
• mosaic
• nature machine
• negative space
• network graph
• noise as signal
• opacity
• overprint
• paper
• path stroke
• plane sheet
• projection depth
• reading order
• repetition rhythm visual
• resonance pitch
• ribbon
• rule andamento follows form
• rule imperfection alive
• rule recombine not copy
• saturation hue
• scale crop
• tessellation
• thread textile
• time as material
• turbulence
• type
• witness transparency

All studies