Minor
Index
A research project on small language models raised on narrow, local collections — and the visual system that prints it. This guide is how the system is used, so that what comes out of it stays one voice.
Four rules the rest follows from
Minor Index works inside the major stack and bends it. The identity does the same: it is built from found parts, made to survive bad copies, and kept local.
Degraded reproduction is the brief
Everything is designed to survive a photocopier, a thermal printer, e-ink and a low-resolution screen. That is not a limitation we tolerate; it is the constraint the identity is drawn from. If it only works on a good monitor, it is not finished.
Minor, not small
“Minor” is another logic, not a lesser one. The marks are rough, hand-made and singular on purpose. Do not clean them up into something that could belong to anyone.
Bricolage, not blueprint
The bricoleur assembles what already exists. The system has a fixed vocabulary — four marks, twelve bodies, five inks, one press — and new work recombines it. Nothing is drawn fresh in an editor.
A plate is code, and code is the original
Every image is reproducible from its numbers. If a plate is wrong, change the number that made it and print it again. Never retouch an export: the next export would lose it.
A family with no head
Four marks, drawn by Frank. None leads: each one is chosen by where it is going, and all four carry the name equally. They are distance fields, so each can be cut flat, screened, outlined, bitten or printed out of register by the same press.
The stroke with the name set either side of it. For when the name has to be read.
The X between its two attendants. For a single square to fill.
The gesture alone. Crosses a layout; can bleed off the edge.
A signature-sized mark. Small, repeated, in a margin; never as a headline.
Three cutsWhat Frank drew the figure two ways — filled with an inline, and as an outline — is a cut, and any mark can take it.
Clear spaceThe unit is x: the cap height of INDEX in the lockup, and one tenth of the box for the other marks. Nothing enters x on any side — type, furniture, the sheet's edge.
Smallest sizesBelow these the marks close up. Screened marks need room for the dots: at least twelve cells across the narrowest stroke.
| Mark | Flat · print | Flat · screen | Screened · print | Screened · screen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lockup (width) | 25 mm | 120 px | 60 mm | 320 px |
| Figure (height) | 10 mm | 32 px | 30 mm | 160 px |
| Stroke (width) | 12 mm | 48 px | 35 mm | 200 px |
| Scrawl (width) | 8 mm | 28 px | 25 mm | 140 px |
Through the pressThe same four marks, pulled the four ways the identity prints. These are the only four.
Two plates, a marker, a stamp
Five inks, one table. Toner on the first plate at 15°, blu on the second at 75°, fluo laid flat like a highlighter, on white or grey stock. A sixth colour is a pass nobody paid for.
Screens, not tintsThere are no lighter versions of an ink. A lighter tone is the same ink at a lower dot area, and it shows its dots.
PairingsInk on ground. Struck-through pairs are not used: they either vanish on a photocopy or put fluo through a screen.
On pressThe hex values are the source. Everything else is a conversion.
CMYK values on this page are straight conversions for proofing, not separations. Blu and fluo are spot colours and are matched on press: blu to the Blu nCHANT 02 the film was printed with, fluo to a fluorescent yellow. Neither is a Pantone reference yet; record the swatch when one is chosen.
One drawn letter, one working face
Minor Index is the identity's own alphabet: the same distance field as the bodies, so a word can go through the press with everything else. Archivo does the reading — running text, interfaces, small print.
Minor IndexDisplay and lettering. Set in capitals: lowercase prints as the capital cut small. Never below 14 px or 9 pt.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0123456789 & ÉÈÀÇŒ · ° — ?!
ArchivoText, captions, interfaces. Regular and SemiBold; capitals in small sizes are set wide (118%) and tracked +0.13em.
A Minor Index could be the dark web version of a language model: an obsessive search engine trained on what the big networks never archived — zines, small-press catalogues, community archives.
Caption · Archivo SemiBold 118% · +0.13em
ScaleFive steps. On a page, use three at most.
Coverage becomes dot area
Every mark and body is screened the same way: a rotated lattice, toner at 15°, blu at 75°. The screen is set for the medium the work is going to, not for the monitor it is made on.
House settingsStart here. The atelier's controls are named the same.
| Medium | Dot spacing | Angle | Dot size | Fringe | Grain | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photocopy A4/A3 | 4.4–7 px | 15° | 0.54 | 9 | 0.18 | The default plate. A copy of a copy should still read. |
| Thermal printer 58/80 mm | ≥ 5 px | 15° | 0.6 | 6 | 0, on ink only | Black only. 384 / 576 px wide at 203 dpi. Grain off: the head adds its own. |
| Device square screen, e-ink | 3.2–4.4 px | 15° or 75° | 0.54 | 8 | 0.12 | Knocked out on black. No fluo on e-ink. |
| Web & slides | 3.6–5 px | 15° | 0.54 | 9 | 0.18 | Export SVG; PNG at 2×. |
| Poster riso / offset | 7–13 px | 15° + 75° | 0.66 | 15 | 0.26 | Over-inked: let the forms grow together. |
Twelve bodies and an appetite
Beside the marks, the system grows bodies: the sun, the cell, the seed head, the spiral and their kin. They carry the identity where the name is not needed. What is done to them — twist, growth, bites, eclipse — is the appetite.
The appetiteDone to a field, in this order. Bites are taken at the contour, never at random.
The formats plates are cut at
A plate is a sheet, not a canvas. These are the sizes, drawn to one scale; the furniture — trim marks, brackets, axes, a band at the foot — is placed by proportion, so it lands in the same place on every one.
FurnitureWhat a press leaves that is not the image. Use it to frame, never to decorate.
What the system never does
Each of these has been tempting at least once. Each breaks a principle in chapter 01.
The system, applied
Every one of these is a plate state from the atelier, plus a line of type. Open it there and change the numbers.
Take it from the source
The marks below are generated now, from the fields, in the inks of the table. The fonts and the atelier are on this site.
Credits
- Marks
- Frank
- Visual research
- with Lapo Sorride
- System, press & typeface
- MINOR INDEX Atelier — github.com/yunglong28/minor-index-atelier