FINALLY! (the stamp project)

This is a cool stamp series I found of all the states.

So, Rosie and I may have finally just cracked our current project. We've have been struggling all this week to figure out what it is to make this project work, but I'm glad we pushed through. To explain the project a little, we decided to promote our hometowns by encouraging the locals, neighboring areas to take advantage of all the great stuff going on in the city. Maybe not the typical things that everyone knows and has done 100 times. We wanted to give people a reason to just do something and get them out and doing things, whether it's with their family, or their friends, or their significant other, or just themselves. We thought stamps would be an interesting form to use as our promotion. We figure stamps are bought at your local post office and could be sold specifically in your town. So, I am from Baltimore County and Baltimore City is the city I would go to (approx. 20 min away) and for Rosie shes also approx. 20 min outside Boston. Then this is where we got stuck...

We couldn't think of a way to tie together the purpose of the stamps and what goes on them. Of course we knew of plenty of places to go, but what were they going to look like and why? We toyed with several ideas: type, funny sayings, double meanings, using 2 stamps, icons/symbols, line drawings, photographic, definitions... etc, etc. Then we realized that it was more than just telling people places to go for food, art, culture, or recreation. People actually need to be given a time to do these things, it is more about events going on, on specific dates that people might not know about. The stamp design is going to reflect an event that takes place and give the date. So, for the aesthetic we figured it would make sense for the stamps to be mini posters advertising these events (and in the booklet of stamps a list of all the events and dates with more info?). Rosie and I are thinking this project has more legs that we ever thought it would, but we are gonna tackle the stamps first and see what comes next. We are making sure we don't get ahead of ourselves... hahaha.

We also started wondering why advertising hasn't taken over the postage stamp market? I asked Ann (our ad teacher) if there was some government law or postal service rules on stamps, but she said anyone can design stamps these days and it will probably lead to such things.