09.07.08
The Beatles and I.D. magazine

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American I.D. magazine has just (very kindly) made our Beatles stamps ‘best of category’ in graphics in their 54th annual review, on US newsstands this week. Other category winners included the iPhone in the Consumer Products category. We’ve reprinted their review below, and following that a brief Q&A.

Beatles Stamps

It’s a familiar cliché: No bigger than a postage stamp. Diminutive. Trivial. Easily overlooked. Yet for the three jurors who pored over the hundreds of entries in the Graphics category, a set of six commemorative Beatles stamps mounted on a modest black board caught their eye most forcefully.

Created by Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks for Britain’s Royal Mail, the stamps portray the Fab Four in casual stacks of LPs, each topped with an essential album from the band’s brief history. Since their release, they’ve become the U.K.’s best-selling (non-royalty) stamps.

Six images, six perfect packages; in the end, there wasn’t any question. Goldberg summed it up: “This condenses design down to its perfect moment. It’s emotional, it’s beautiful, it’s simple. It isn’t about whether it’s good typography or bad typography, it’s about an idea that ultimately says it, 100 percent.” For Dixon, the stamps balanced emotion and brand familiarity—always a tricky tightrope for designers. “You feel good looking at them,” he said. “You feel those record covers, and I like how the Queen’s silhouette works on all six. It’s a clever way to reference the Beatles’ visual history without taking it over the top.” Martin appreciated the project’s populist appeal: “I’ve never seen stamps like these before,” he said. “I like that something so simple and well-designed can become so popular—that millions of people get to enjoy something of that quality.”

Clearly, what most set the Beatles stamps apart from their competition was scale: In the same way that we love kittens and babies and Shrinky-Dinks, experiencing a 12-by-12-inch album cover reduced down to something, well, no bigger than a postage stamp triggers a mysterious endorphin inside us. As Goldberg said, “This is the one thing we got all smiley over.”

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Q+A with Michael Johnson, Johnson Banks
Your firm has been designing stamps for years. What’s the range of your projects?
We did some pretty dull cats-and-dogs stamps at the turn of the century, but in 2003, we managed to get through a very unusual set of fruit-and-vegetable faces: 10 basic stamps and 72 stickers you used to build portraits on them.

I remember those; they were in I.D.’s 2004 Annual Design Review. Whose idea were the Beatles stamps?
The Royal Mail’s. Amazingly, they had never done any Beatles stamps and decided the time had come. Their hook was the 50th anniversary of Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting, in 1957.

All our jurors loved your brilliant stack-of-LPs motif. What other designs were rejected?
We looked at many different ideas: haircuts, instruments, even a series of “walking” stamps that ended with Abbey Road’s famous crossing. Luckily, a failed attempt to place the album covers on a ’60s shag carpet—with accompanying cigarette butts—gave me the idea to just use the covers on their own.

Nice recovery. Another favorite was each stamp’s unique die-cut shape. How difficult was that to sell?
When I had the thought to do it, I immediately rang the client to check that we could do asymmetric stamps. They phoned back days later with a tentative, “Yes, maybe.” I was in continual fear that the stamps would become regulated into one arrangement by the production process, but in the end we managed to keep them all different, with random edges that followed the shape of the album stack. To be honest, the toughest bit was designing the perforations to carefully follow the edges; the holes have to be equally spaced, 0.9-mm semicircles. It’s true! How geeky does that sound?

Quite! What advice can you give designers whose final product is one inch square?
The biggest challenge is to keep looking at things in actual size—don’t blow them up at all. It’s incredibly frustrating at first, but you adjust to it. The simplest ideas always work best.

Okay, final question. You, Michael Johnson: Beatles or Stones?
Well, as far as albums owned, it has to be the Beatles. But as for “tracks I can play on guitar,” I think it’s the Stones. Does that make it a tie?

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