Giotto english

Security Design System

Giotto, the famous Italian painter was said to be able to draw perfect circles by hand. Our system has been conceived to design and draw perfect security graphic elements that may contain desired imperfections which combined produce the best effects against counterfeiting. After all, nobody is perfect.

The main idea is to constantly provide new security elements and dynamic variations so as to stay one step ahead of counterfeiters and their available techniques, without creating extreme complex procedures for the securities designer or artist. The Giotto Security Design System has come to life from the experience that Pitagora’s engineers obtained after several years of work in the commercial security printing market throughout the world. Such experience together with the challenge to provide innovative security solutions for the protection of products within the global economy, provide the inspiration. Following the expressed concepts, the system has been developed considering the possibilities to generate the traditional guilloche or rosettes, borders, backgrounds, relief effect or numismatics, latent images, void or photocopy, as well as offering the tools to design new evolved elements introducing dynamic changes that make each design unique.
However, we have conceived the system as part of an artistic process, which requires the artist or designer to investigate the proper shapes or designs suitable for the final harmonic composition, an additional reason to create unique designs.				Giotto work's window screenshot

Technical approach

Authentic rosettes are made up of a complex mathematical representation that resembles the operation of a traditional mechanical or electro-mechanical guilloche machine which starts drawing at a certain point and returns exactly to the departure point, always maintaining a continuous path with the line. Such traditional concept is enhanced by the design options offered by the software in that the line can be thickened or slimmed in certain areas as desired or following a grayscale picture background, including the possibility to create a three dimensional effect with the rosette. The purpose of such variations on the line thickness is to reflect the original engravings where this variation was obtained by pressing harder on the engraving tool.

Once again, the traditional borders and frames were created by cutting, repeating and pasting rosette elements to form the desired graphical composition, and although the same effect can also be achieved with the computer, the program can generate the right borders or frames in one step, matching angles perfectly and giving control of the design flow within the angles. The creation process for rosettes and background designs used to be quite complex, and there were no guaranties that the final graphical composition would be satisfactory, since there were no means to see the result a-priori. Thanks to today’s technology and the Giotto Security Design System, the designer can see the result of his or her graphical composition and its effectiveness against counterfeiting, with the possibility to intervene by changing the concentration and/or quantity of lines in a rosette, or varying the line thickness cyclically for each turn or for each revolution of the generating function, where rosettes can follow certain limits or escape these borders, designing a new generation of styles using several layers of combined generating functions. A new feature produces a line color modulation, meaning the line changes color according to selected parameters or according to a background colour photograph during the guilloche creation process which adds security to the design.

Giotto also provides the possibility to design Relief Effect backgrounds starting from a line pattern with all its variations, and according to an imported line-art image, text or both, generates a relief effect that can be manually or automatically edited. Editing the relief background consists of adding changes to the baseline or relief thickness independently, changing angles, selecting one element or an area and enhancing the relief on it, providing also the possibility to create two or more colors in perfect register, either one falling in the middle of the other, or two backgrounds crisscrossing each other. The applied changes can also include a certain irregularity only known to the designer, thus creating the personalization security feature. This effect can also be combined with rosettes to obtain the necessary latent image elements, specially designed for intaglio printing, but still effective in offset.

Features

Giotto allows the artist to create guilloche security backgrounds that are generated following a static repetitive design which can be enriched by the possibility to make one or more parameters to dynamically change in an automatic way, creating a design where each line is different from the next, (Step Variable option). These elements can be distorted by modifying the design plane or by adding a dynamically varying parameter which creates progressive changes adding complexity to the final result without compromising the artistic harmony or aesthetics of the final product.

Rosettes are made up of groups of guilloches including negative elements that match each other mathematically allowing the composition of several elements in different colors with perfect register. This guilloche group concept is also valid for the generation of linear borders or complete frames typically used for shares, certificates, passports or even checks. Furthermore, the density or concentration of line paths can be increased or decreased creating lighter or darker areas, as well as using negative elements or “rings”.
The nature of these rosettes allows the designer to create his or her own library of designs. Minor changes can generate a variety of motives, which combined result in a rich base catalog that with minor modifications produce the unique personalization.

In order to produce a repetitive pattern, Giotto provides the Continuous-Variable option, which allows the artist to automatically repeat a certain rosette or background element a number of times with the introduction of a gradual increase or decrease of one or more variables in the original pattern thus creating three dimensional texture effects, and providing excellent security due to the variability of such dynamic patterns, each line is unique, specially if combined with a gray- scale line width modulation from a photograph as background.

Backgrounds or rosettes can also incorporate the Gray scale modulation which consists of the dynamic changes in line thickness to the rosette or background, using as reference width the level of gray coming from an imported background photograph or design.
The line can also change its color dynamically as one of the new effects allows. The combination of Giotto’s effects provides a higher security level design in that each and every line is unique and yet, seen from reading distance, the background image produces a pleasant artistic effect.
The program is based on a tree-type user interface structure with branches and buttons that provide a preview showing the elements and graphical addition of these elements, which make up a design. Such previews help the designer keep track of changes or variations.

Latent image elements creation, either negative or positive, effective both in offset and specially designed for Intaglio printing, as well as the generation of the Void or Photocopy pattern. These latent images can be simple line art patterns or guilloches with a two level line pattern, or they can be further enriched by adding a background gray scale image to produce dynamic line width modulation. Designed Shapes allows the operator to create any form outside the program, import such design and use it as borders for a guilloche to flow inside, or the shape of a generating function.
The Gray scale relief effect option offers the possibility to obtain a gradual relief effect proportional to the intensity of gray, (256 levels) coming from the background image or text. Such option offers an even more interesting effect with the addition of the line width modulation.

Precision
All mathematical calculations and modelling are done with the precision of one micron or 25400 DPI and, according to the customer's photounit, the resolution is brought down to the maximum output machine resolution. Some of the photounits work at 3600 DPI, others at 4000, 5080, or even lower, and although our system can output in postscript format to any of these machines and resolutions, we recommend no less than 3000 DPI. Pitagora offers a postscript photounit capable of outputing film at 4000, 8000 and 12000 DPI matching the highest precision with practicality.
Policy
Pitagora SA can sell the Giotto Security Design System as a complete turn-key system including all the necessary hardware, such as PC station, scanner, proof printer, postscript RIP and photounit. The Giotto Software package is also available whenever the customer has already a typesetting facility which includes scanner, proof printers and postscript photounit.
Components
Giotto is made up of a Basic Module that allows the user to generate rosettes, backgrounds, frames and borders, as previously explained, with the addition of five optional modules as follows:
1. Step-variable and continuous-variable module 2. Designed shapes and Auto-masking module 3. Gray scale line width and color modulation module 4. Pattern morphing modulation module, (this module requires module 1) 5. Standard and gray scale relief effect module, (this module requires module 1)

DEMO

System Configuration

The minimum system configuration is made up of a personal computer station with a high quality scanner, a color proof printer, commercial pagination software packages and the Giotto software package. The complete turn key system for high quality film output includes a 4000, 8000 or even 12000 DPI photounit depending on special requirements, and can be easily integrated to an existing installation or work in standalone mode in a high security production room.

Giotto runs under MS Windows 95/98 or NT/2000® only on PC platforms, and can generate graphic files in several formats so as to render the elements compatible with most of the existing composition programs in the market today. Some of these formats are EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), PS (PostScript) or Bitmap, which are known as the most common grafic formats.

Finally, all designs are generated with a resolution that can go up to the micron, (25’400 dpi) however such precision is not necessary since the existing photounits go as high as 12’000 dpi, (only for some special applications). Any resolution can be defined, but the standard resolutions for most photounits in the market are: 3000, 3600, 4000, 5080 or even 8000 dpi and can be selected from the options menu within the program.


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General info

Brochure.doc

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Exemple designed by Claudio Milan	Bank note.jpg	2.'783 KB
	ID Card 1.jpg	742 KB
	ID Card 2.jpg	844 KB

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Company profile

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PITAGORA SA
Via Vignola 14
CH 6900 LUGANO
Switzerland

Telephone:	+41 79 436 50 83
Fax:	+41 91 976 05 46
Email addresses:	info@truescan.ch
General information:	info@pitagora.ch
Sales & customer information:	info@pitagora.ch

Pitagora S.A. was founded in Lugano Switzerland in 1997, to concentrate the dedication as well as the efforts of several engineers towards the development and use of new technologies in two very distinctive fields, such as Data Acquisition and Security Printing.

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