Best of Category

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 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."

Design Johnson Banks (London): Michael Johnson, designer
Client Royal Mail Stamps and Collectibles
Software Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, FreeHand