Art Goes Postal

At Signals Design Group, thinking small is the key to delivering on a massive project.

Whether a postage stamp is Art with a capital A, it’s hard to say. For one, it’s so small you can barely see it. But what a stamp gives away in size it regains in abundance and reach. For an artist, this creates an interesting quandary: given the choice, would he rather have one large masterpiece hanging in a gallery or a million microscopic ones whizzing under everyone’s noses?

If you’ve posted a letter since January 13, 2009, you know designer and illustrator John Belisle’s answer. His stamps, commissioned by Canada Post Corp. for the 2010 Olympics, are layered depictions of five winter athletes, with movements swooping red and orange. There’s no grander show than the Games, and the stamps are a landmark project for Belisle and Kosta Tsetsekas, the other principal of Signals Design Group Inc. Surely the men regard this as their biggest job? “Well, not literally,” says Belisle, a smile turning his lip.

Creating a stamp involves a lot of back and forth between the designer and the client – in this case Belisle and Canada Post, with the occasional soupçon of opinion from VANOC. A weekend hockey player, Belisle counts Canada’s drubbing of the U.S. in the 2002 gold-medal final as his fondest Olympic memory and wanted the sport on this year’s Olympic stamps. But Canada Post nixed the idea, choosing bobsledding, curling, aerial skiing, snowboarding and sledge hockey.

Belisle works on an Apple G5 with Adobe Illustrator and does his rendering with a mouse, not a tablet and stylus – an anachronistic preference that makes his junior designers snicker. Ideas become sketches, and sketches become printouts, which are then debated, obsessed over and redrafted until, finally, a 30-megabyte file is sent off for Canada Post’s imprimatur. Once all the talking is done, it takes 10 full days of computer work to produce a single stamp.

Belisle drew primary inspiration from the heroic imagery of Olympic stamps from the 1940s and 1950s, wanting at all costs to avoid the squat modernism of the Montreal 1976 esthetic. But while heroic imagery can stray into propaganda, Belisle’s stamps bear not a trace of chauvinism or ardour for Olympic ideals.

What are they about, then, in a word? Belisle uncrosses his arms, leans on the table and looks hard at his five stamps. Silence. “Movement, really,” he says. “That’s it.”