Minitel Service Screen vs Teletext Art
ミニテルのサービス画面 / テレテキスト・アート
Both split the character grid into blocks to build pictures and headings on a terminal screen with few colors.
How to tell them apart. A mosaic of eight colors filling the screen with a picture is Teletext. A service name at the top and numbered choices below is Minitel.
Minitel Service Screen
A service page built to finish inside one screen of a grid terminal. The name of the service sits along the top, the choices run down the screen as a numbered list, and headings and pictures are assembled from coarse blocks that divide the character cell.
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 Service Screen | Teletext Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1980–2012 | 1974–2012 / revival |
| Family | Digital Retro | Lettering |
| Kind | Layout | Style |
| Cues | A band carrying the name of the service along the top, with numbered choices running down the screen in one column / Headings and pictures assembled from blocks that split a single character cell three down and two across / Only eight saturated colours in play, with no intermediate hues and no gradation / The place to type marked by a band of reversed video, with emphasis limited to reversal 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. |