Design Icons The Olivetti Valentine

It is one of the Pop Design icons, born in 1968 from the project of two design stars such as Ettore Sottsass and Perry A. King.
Officially on the market since 1969, the Olivetti Valentine represents a true diva of writing, in full accord with the epochal changes that that decade would bring.
In the streets, youth protest was underway. The 1970s was a real cultural revolution, made up of ideas, but also of graphics, posters and completely new forms of communication.
The main feature of the Valentine, also emphasised heavily by the advertising campaign, is the machine's portability. In fact, it will be the first to be fitted with a handle, inserted in a container whose closure is secured by the rear of the machine itself; the external case in which up until then laptops were closed is replaced by a simple plastic shell to protect it from any blow. It redefined the concept of 'working outside the office' or 'smart working', effectively introducing the concept that would be taken up with computers, i.e. working with the laptop on your lap. Valentine is clearly a predestined for success. In fact, just a year after its release, in 1970, it brought the Compasso d'Oro and in 1971 entry to the MoMa, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the section Architecture and Design.
Pop art culturewhich clearly influences its design from the original idea and clearly differentiates it from the traditional Olivetti line, also influences communication.
The Valentine has the same mechanics as another of Olivetti's icons, the Lettera 32, and is clearly not a reinterpretation of Nizzoli's chic and elegant Lettera 22 typewriter.
Olivetti therefore asked Sottsass to design a portable, low-priced typewriter, for which he designed not only the design but also the advertising campaign, with two other advertising icons such as Roberto Pieracini and Milton Glaser.
The designer himself said: "We designed Valentine thinking a bit about these things and thinking that a biro, a hat, a jacket, a laptop can also be part, at a certain point, of a type of rhythm, of a catalogue of values, of a measure of spaces or environments that are not inevitably those of property, of snobbery, of continuity, of definition and all these things, but they can also be the environments, the spaces, the rhythms, the dimensions and values of a continuous creativity, of the permanent disavowal and recreation of languages, of a permanent shifting of balances and, in the end, of a kind of permanent game of winks, of handshakes, of passing on ideas, of proposals'. This explains the essence and eternal contemporaneity of the Olivetti Valentine.