Minitel (Télétel) Screen vs Teletext Art
ミニテル画面 / テレテキスト・アート
Minitel (Télétel) Screen comes from Digital Retro and Teletext Art from Lettering. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Minitel (Télétel) Screen
The screen craft laid down by France's Télétel standard. Pictures are tiled out of mosaic characters on a grid of 40 columns by 24 rows, each cell divided three down and two across, and the whole palette runs to eight colours, which are black, white, blue, green, red, yellow, magenta and cyan. A service was known by the short code that followed 3615, and the terminals stayed in use until 2012.
Teletext Art
Screen art made inside broadcast text, a mosaic of 40 by 24 characters in eight fixed colors. The extreme abstraction of Ceefax weather maps and news pages is being revived now as a classic of constraint.
| Minitel (Télétel) Screen | Teletext Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1980–2012 | 1974–2012 / revival |
| Family | Digital Retro | Lettering |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | A grid of 40 columns by 24 rows where letters and pictures occupy cells of exactly the same size / Images assembled from blocks that split a single character cell three down and two across / Only eight saturated colours in play, which are black, white, blue, green, red, yellow, magenta and cyan / Emphasis available in two forms only, reversed video and an underline | Eight-color mosaic / The 40x24 frame / Pseudo-curves from blocks / The look of broadcast infrastructure |
| Best used for | Fitting a picture and running text onto one screen where both must sit on the same character grid · Designing a screen limited to eight colours, where emphasis can only come from reversed video and underlines | Moving announcement screens for music or shows that sell constraint · Stream backdrops and looping standby screens before a show starts |
| Type | Everything sits on one fixed width cell. Since type size cannot change, emphasis has to come from reversed video and underlines alone. | One monospaced face only, hierarchy from double-height headings |
| Composition | Rule the 40 by 24 grid first, then allocate heading, body and input field onto it. Never overflow the rows, because each screen has to be complete in itself. | Everything inside forty columns and twenty four rows, on the grid |
| Material | Build images from blocks that divide one cell into six, three down and two across. Hold to eight colours, and allow any single cell at most two of them, one for the character and one for its ground. | Eight-color block mosaic, dithering faking intermediate tones |
| Caution | Smooth curves and midtones half erase the coarseness of the divided cell, and once that goes the grid holding the whole thing up stops being visible. | Raising the resolution to smooth the drawing removes the necessity behind the coarseness and leaves a merely retro-looking picture. |