“Dear Valentine, this is to tell you that you are my friend as well as my Valentine, and that I intend to write you lots of letters”, says the user guide of the familiar red typewriter. This purposefully heartwarming greeting sets the tone for Ettore Sottsass’ typewriter. The blood-red Valentine was a fun, light-hearted and smooth-operating symbol of the 1960s Pop era, and its use of bright, playful casing for a piece of traditional office equipment was arguably a precursor to 1998 Bondi Blue iMac. “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism”, said Sottsass. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”
The Valentine—created for the Italian brand Olivetti—was designed in collaboration with the British designer Perry King and entered production in 1969. It was not a commercial success. The Valentine was technically mediocre, expensive and failed to sell to a mass audience, yet still became a design classic. Valentines can be found in the permanent collections of London’s Design Museum and MoMA, the typewriter being accepted into the latter just two years after its launch. The product’s critical success was unhindered by its functional limitations because its design focused as much on its emotional connection to users as it did on practical ease of use.
Sottsass set out his stall early on. One of the initial advertising campaigns for the design featured posters by the graphic designer and founder of New York magazine, Milton Glaser. Glaser used a detail of Piero di Cosimo’s renaissance painting, Satyr Mourning over Nymph. In the poster, the Valentine typewriter is placed next to a red setter, an elegant, rambunctious dog; man’s best friend. The suggestion was that Sottsass’ portable accessory could be just as loyal and convivial. How the product performed was arguably irrelevant. It was about how it made you feel.
The Valentine was available in white, green and blue, but its most famous form was red: lipstick-bright ABS plastic casing, with black plastic keys and white lettering. “Every color has a history”, said Sottsass, “Red is the color of the Communist flag, the color that makes a surgeon move faster and the color of passion.”
The distinctive color was calculated to bring vibrancy and fun into the office world of the 1960s. Sottsass said that the Valentine “was invented for use any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country or to provide a highly colored object on a table in a studio apartment.” The ideas that later manifested themselves in 1970s Memphis movement—the Milan design group known for its brightly colored postmodern furniture—were already evident in the Valentine typewriter. Sottsass gave a standardized piece of office equipment personality.
Although, the designer would later dismiss the Valentine—comparing it to “a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up”—its design was an elegant summation of his belief that successful, long-lasting product design was not solely connected to performance, but rather owed as much to the emotional force of a design.
