An engineer’s typewriter factory in Piedmont.

Olivetti began as a typewriter company. Camillo Olivetti founded it as Ing. C. Olivetti & C. at Ivrea, in Piedmont north of Turin, and Italian Wikipedia quotes the notarial deed that dates the company to 29 October 1908. According to the same article, Camillo put in land and an industrial building that had housed an earlier business of his making electrical measuring instruments, and early machine tools were chosen on a trip to the United States soon after the founding.

The firm was built up mainly by Camillo’s son, Adriano Olivetti, English Wikipedia says. Italian Wikipedia records that Adriano became director of the company in 1932 and president in 1938. Under him Olivetti widened from typewriters into calculating machines — the Divisumma calculator line appeared in the 1940s — and later into electronics, with the Elea 9003 computer of 1959.

Typewriters stayed at the centre for decades. English Wikipedia describes a sequence that runs from fully mechanical machines until the mid-1960s, through the electromechanical Tekne and Editor series and the Praxis 48, to the Lexicon 90 typeball machines of 1972, the TES 401 and TES 501 electronic word-processing machines of 1978 and the ET series of office electronics, with portable electronic Praxis models for home users from 1982.

In 1959 Olivetti bought the American Underwood Typewriter Company, and in 1986 it acquired the German office-equipment maker Triumph-Adler from the American group Litton Industries, English Wikipedia says.

Nizzoli, Sottsass, Bellini — and Pintori.

Olivetti’s reputation rests on the designers it hired. English Wikipedia credits Marcello Nizzoli with leading the company’s industrial design from the 1940s to the 1960s; Italian Wikipedia dates the collaboration from 1938 and lists the Lexikon 80 office typewriter and the Divisumma 14 calculator of 1948, the Lettera 22 portable of 1950, the Studio 44 of 1952 and the Lettera 32 of 1963. Italian Wikipedia describes the Lettera 22 as a project by Giuseppe Beccio with Nizzoli. English Wikipedia dates the Lettera 22 to 1949, or to 1950 according to Telecom Italia. In the United States it was also sold under other names, including the Sears Courier.

The architect Ettore Sottsass began working with Olivetti in the late 1950s. English Wikipedia credits him with the Tekne 3 typewriter of 1958, the Elea 9003 computer of 1959, the Praxis 48 typewriter of 1964 and the Valentine portable of 1969, a portable in red plastic. Mario Bellini joined in 1963 and designed the Programma 101 calculator of 1965 and, according to English Wikipedia, most of the later ET, ETV and Praxis electronic typewriters. George Sowden, Michele De Lucchi and, in 2007, Jasper Morrison followed.

The museum record began early. In 1952 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry, and Italian Wikipedia says the Lettera 22 and Lexikon 80 entered MoMA’s permanent collection that year. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris mounted another Olivetti exhibition in 1969.

Graphics mattered as much as product. Italian Wikipedia says its posters were drawn at the start by Marcello Dudovich, followed by Costantino Nivola in 1937 and then Giovanni Pintori, who ran advertising and corporate graphics from 1938 to 1968, later joined by Egidio Bonfante. English Wikipedia dates Pintori’s hiring to 1936, credits him as the creator of the Olivetti logo, and says he was art director from 1950. Architects named in the company’s history include Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, BBPR and Figini e Pollini, who worked on factories, offices and showrooms.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all typewriter names: Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Underwood, Hermes, Imperial, Facit and Triumph-Adler. Typewriter brands in general sit at many different points in their histories, from names that moved on to computers and office equipment to marques that closed their factories long ago and now live on mainly through collectors, archives and old advertising.

A typewriter brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single machine than by a nameplate, a decal, a case and the advertising around it, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed hands, moved production or stopped making typewriters altogether. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns the name now, where its machines were made, and when typewriter production ended.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its machines were made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From typewriters to TIM.

The typewriter business did not survive the personal computer. English Wikipedia says that by 1994 Olivetti had stopped producing typewriters, as most users had moved to PCs. The company had made its own personal computers from the 1980s, but it spun off that business in 1997, sold its computer-services arm in 1998 and turned to telecommunications, English Wikipedia says.

That turn ended in an unusual reversal. In 1999 Olivetti won control of Telecom Italia, the much larger national telephone company. After a 2003 reorganisation Olivetti became Telecom Italia’s office-equipment and systems subsidiary, for a time trading as Olivetti Tecnost. Italian Wikipedia records that Telecom Italia announced on 29 June 2005 that it would relaunch the Olivetti name in information technology, restoring the original mark. Today Olivetti S.p.A. is based at Ivrea and is part of the TIM group, as Telecom Italia is now known; its later products have included office printers, calculators, the OliPad tablet of 2011 and Oliphone smartphones from 2013.

The design legacy has outlived the typewriter factory. Italian Wikipedia notes that an open-air museum of modern architecture has guided walkers around Ivrea’s Olivetti buildings since 2001.

For a design guide, Olivetti shows how a typewriter maker can build one identity across product, poster and building. Compare Underwood, the American typewriter maker Olivetti bought in 1959, and Triumph-Adler, the German maker it acquired in 1986. For this guide we use a Valentine red, a sea-green and an ivory with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Olivetti’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.