Today, incorporating physical objects into digital design is a way to create a unique aesthetic or a new perspective on a project. For example, to design the icons for Google’s Material Design language, designers cut and folded paper prototypes of the icons before translating them into digital pixels. Similarly, the designers behind the opening sequence of Stranger Things rigged up a manual light-based stencil system to capture the grainy, organic vibe of the credits.

It’s easy to forget that there was a time when every identity design or title sequence was made physically, as a recently unearthed photo that shows the making of the 1962 Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française logo reminds us.

Time to dig this out again! The Eurovision ident used to be made of string (bottom pic 1954). #Eurovision2017 #ESC2017 pic.twitter.com/spaaRUCA9s — Andrew Wiseman (@aswiseman) May 13, 2017

The photo depicts the TV channel’s shimmering logo as a physical installation–what looks like a tunnel of strings with the RTF word mark floating in the center. It shows the lengths to which the television company went to produce a dynamic logo that went beyond the 2D marks of the day. An archival video shows the result of the intriguing contraption–the quivering strings create an animated shimmering effect:

The original photo, which was found by television history buff Andrew Wiseman and published by This Is Colossal, opened up an interesting discussion online about other midcentury logos that originated as physical objects. After it was posted to Reddit, a slew of comments revealed other logos of the time that used a similar approach.

The BBC, for instance, has used many mechanical models and dioramas to create its idents in a pre-digital world, including its very first logo:

Another noteworthy example? The 1969 BBC1 logo, nicknamed the “mirror globe” ident. The logo was made using a device created by the BBC to film its idents called the Noddy camera. With the novel system, announcers could control the camera remotely, directing it to pan and tilt or move both vertically and horizontally across a matrix of prearranged physical objects.