"[17] Over time, Sottsass himself – who thought of the Valentine as the Bic Biro/Cristal of typewriters, his oggetto rosso 'red object' – would tire of its design, calling it "too obvious, a bit like a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up.

"[18][19][6][5] Olivetti originally conceived the Valentine as a response to the early 1960s flood of inexpensive pragmatically designed manual typewriters from Japan,[20] such as those from Brother and Silver Seiko.

Olivetti insisted on more expensive color-impregnated, impact-resistant injection-molded ABS plastic, rather than the prototype's Moplen,[22] as well as both upper and lower case capability and the right margin bell.

At introduction, the user manual was printed on a set of small "tags" held together with a loop of string, with cheeky phrasing describing the main functions, accompanied by simple black and white illustrations.

[22] Over the course of production, design revisions included enlarging the orange ribbon caps, and adding two prominent dimples at the top of the bodywork, to help prevent scuffing when removing the typewriter or returning it to its case.

[23] Though often called la rossa portatile (the red portable), the Valentine was also subsequently manufactured in very small numbers in white, blue and green, respectively for Italy, France and Germany.

Notably, the Valentine shared numerous features (including its bold red color, floating black keys, and ABS typewriter body with a pronounced rear plate that mated to a plastic sleeve case) with the Monpti typewriter, designed by Stefan Lengyel in 1968 (the same year the Valentine was designed) for Zbrojovka Brno NP in Vyškov, Czechoslovakia.

[26] Over the course of time, Sottsass saw the design as cloying and came to openly resent the Valentine, saying: "I worked sixty years of my life, and it seems the only thing I did is this fucking red machine.

In Olivetti's marketing statement at the Valentine's introduction, Sottsass noted: The launch advertising ultimately used a range of graphic artists: Sottsass himself[17] along with Roberto Pieraccini,[29] Walter Ballmer [it], Egidio Bonfante [it],[30] Tadaaki Kanasashi,[28][31] Tesro Itoh,[28] Yoshitaro Isaka, George Leavitt,[32] Graziella Marchi,[33] Adrianus Van Der Elst[34] and Milton Glaser,[3] playing off the painting The Death of Procris (circa 1495) by Piero di Cosimo,[28] depicted the Valentine in a renaissance setting with a dog, suggesting that "it, too, was man’s best friend.

[17] Large posters were posted on city streets, in subways and railway; radio spots announced its arrival along with advertisements in popular magazines.