Comment : stamp design

Abstract

Stamp Design is a specialised form of art and not every painter or graphic artist becomes a good stamp designer. What may be excellent in a frame of wall size I 00 cm x 65 cm will look very different scaled down to 3 cm x 2 cm. This is a truth that is often forgotten by Postal Administrations, Stamp Design Committees and artists. Basically the designer of a postage stamp is a miniaturist, although possibly not with the same attention to detail as the miniaturists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What the artist has to keep in mind is that the postage stamp he is designing has to convey a certain message and must have natural spaces for the name of the country, value of the stamp and, possibly, a short title inscription. Many good artists are unable to make the crossing, if one may be permitted a pun, into the land of Lilliput. [excerpt]