Week 6

Post office:

Above: another photo collage experiment focusing around post office as a theme.

To enable my final for this week to be more focused, I have discovered that the first 24hr post office outside of London was is Woburn in the 1800’s. The post office is now “The Woburn Hotel” and I have taken pictures of that on the previous page.

I have done some research about the 1800’s and how post advanced during that time. The Penny Black was released 1840 and was the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, first issued in the UK.

  • Penny Black Stamp with Queen Victoria, released 1840.
  • The Penny Lilac was the basic penny postage stamp of Great Britain from its first issue on 12 July 1881 and was used until 1901.
From looking at the above post stamps I can see that framing is evident in both – and high contrasting elements i.e. colour, image and clear borders.

At this point, I am considering the purpose of all the geometric forms used in the mailing industry. There are rectangular letterboxes, rectangular postage stamps and type forms were blocks, created with letterpress. I have had an idea of creating a stamp inspired by Woburn, using the materials I have gathered from exploring the village.

I have edited these photos into the below stamps with various effects in photoshop ↓↓↓
I have made mock-ups of Woburn stamps using the three main colours for stamps.

Initially, countries typically made a random choice of colours for denominations. In 1896, the members of the Universal Postal Union agreed on blue, red and green as the standard colours for standard printed matter, postcard, and letter rates, respectively, when sent abroad.

Mock up of how stamps would be presented in stamp books. I have chosen the red one as I feel that linked closely to the royal mail connotations with red for their company logo/branding. I also have tried to create a 3D appearance of the title “Woburn” in white as it provides contrast against the image background.
I have also learnt a new process – how to create a page peel in Photoshop!! Which is really fun to create.
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