Stamp Collecting and Design

One of my earliest inspirations for the impulse that eventually developed into being a graphic designer was collecting stamps, which I did for much of my childhood in Switzerland.

The bulk of my collection was a handful of books of Swiss stamps that I assembled over the course of ten or so years. My parents subscribed (on my behalf) to the Swiss postal service, which meant that for many years I received every mint and postmarked Swiss stamp they produced. I also often haunted the Zurich fleamarket, spending my weekly allowance at one of several vendors selling stamps to young and seasoned collectors. I loved those visits to the fleamarket. The hunt for stamps was largely driven by the beauty of their designs and the portal they opened in my imagination, like the closet in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, to other far-off worlds.

I learned, for example, about colonial countries like Nasyland, Swaziland, and Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika , whose stamps included benevolent (to me, at the time) portraits of George VI or a young Queen Elizabeth. I was confused and unsettled by stamps from 1920s Germany that reflected the hyperinflation of the times with values in the millions. And stamps from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and China conveyed all the menace that communism carried. Many stamp designs, with all the meaning they carried, seared themselves into my impressionable, young mind. Looking at them now brings back deep and evocative memories, though the memories are tempered by a deeper understanding of colonialism, economics, politics, geography, the subject matter pictured on the stamps, and who designed the stamps. I know nothing about stamps currently produced in Africa but can guarantee that many of them convey very different meanings than the stamps I collected as a child.

I still have my stamp collection, though I haven’t done much with it in the past 40 years. But I still tear off stamps on letters from my mother in Switzerland, who still goes out of her way to post correspondence with the latest Swiss stamps. A recent stamp was made not from paper but from linen — something I’d never seen before but a reflection of wealthy Switzerland’s strong design tradition. I immediately bought four sheets of the stamp from the Swiss PTT website. And when I see stamps today I do so through the lens of being a graphic designer, through understanding that design is used not just to make things look beautiful, but to tell stories and narratives — especially, in the case of stamps, the stories we want others to believe about us.

In the process of writing this blog post, I came across the website of another designer, Michael Russem, who has a wonderful section on his site devoted just to stamps and their designers. I had no idea how many heavy hitters in the design world have been commissioned to design stamps including, just for starters, Saul Bass, Max Bill, Neville Brody, Ivan Chermayeff, Seymour Chwast, Wim Crouwel, Louise Fili, Adrian Frutiger, Eric Gill, Milton Glaser, Herb Lubalin, Erik Spiekerman, and Hermann Zapf. And then I remembered that I — and you! — can join this illustrious list by designing our own stamps!

Stamp Collecting and Design

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