Four colours. Anything else gets dithered.

The mark, and the two states a machine can be in

Written down

Twenty rectangles, each a run of whole cells on a 16 by 16 field. That is the whole letter, and it is short enough to read as a list, which is the point of drawing this way.

The third state

Untested stock is the dithered mark: amber at 8 of 16, so the machine is visibly not yet one thing or the other. It stops being dithered the moment somebody tests it.

Sizes

Only whole multiples of sixteen pixels, so every cell is a whole number of pixels: 32, 48, 64, 112. At anything else the browser resamples and the edges soften, which turns a drawing built from cells into a picture of one.

Never

Never a floppy disk, never a CRT with a smiling face, never a drop shadow. The workshop is thirty years past the machines it is named after and does not dress as them.

The rule running · ordered 4 × 4 Bayer, 17 steps from one of the four to another

Why ordered

Error diffusion looks better and cannot be specified. An ordered matrix gives the same pattern every time for the same value, so a shelf label printed today matches one printed last year.

Seventeen steps

Zero to sixteen cells. That is the whole range available between any two of the four, and it is plenty: the workshop uses three of them and the rest exist so nobody has to invent one.

Snapping

With dithering off the mix rounds to whichever of the two it is nearer. Nothing breaks, and that is the honest answer to asking a four colour system for a fifth colour.

At size

The pattern is fixed to the cell, not to the artefact, so a dither on a van door has the same four pixel period as one on a shelf label. Scaling the pattern is how dithering turns into texture.

Four values and three patterns · nothing else is used anywhere

Measured

On the ink ground, bone is 15.2 to 1, amber 7.0 and teal 8.9. Dark ink on either accent is the same 7.0 and 8.9, so a chip works either way round.

The two states

Amber is needs work, teal is tested and working. They are never used decoratively, so a shelf can be read across a room without anyone reading a word.

Both themes

The four do not have a dark variant. Page furniture flips; artefacts do not, because a four colour system with eight colours in it is a four colour system in name only.

Silkscreen for labels and marks · Chivo for anything with sentences in it

Silkscreen sizes

Multiples of eight only: 16, 24, 32 and 48 on this page, dropping a whole step on a phone. A bitmap face at 19 pixels is a bitmap face being resampled, which loses the exact thing it was chosen for.

Where it stops

Labels, marks, part numbers on a shelf. Never a sentence, never a paragraph, never a condition report that somebody has to read twice to check what was replaced.

Mono

Chivo Mono for reference numbers and specifications, so a catalogue number never reads as a word and a person can copy it accurately over the phone.