Philately Fridays: United States Commemorative Mint Stamp Set, 1974

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My good friend Joe recently gave me a few of these gorgeous commemorative stamp sets for my birthday. Each set contains a selection of stamps issued by the United States that year in a folder (front and inside shown above) with info about each stamp. Here's the set from 1974 which features a bunch of stamps I'd never seen before.

Philately Fridays: United States, 1983

Wait, this blog doesn't count as private use, right?

Philately Fridays: United States, 1983

Designed by the legendary Saul Bass*, this couldn't be any more 1983 if it tried. Reminds me of TRON and Marble Madness... but also Joy Division.

* Thanks to Pileup reader Blair Thomson for the Saul Bass credit ID on this one!

Philately Fridays: United States, 1975

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Philately Fridays: United States, 1972

It's hard to go wrong with a stamp design when you're starting with Otl Aicher's outstanding and timeless icons for the 1972 Olympic Games.

Philately Fridays: United States, 1973

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Philately Fridays: USA, 1976

Collecting stamps about collecting stamps.



Related: Lance Wyman's logo for Junior Philatelists:

Charley Harper for the National Park Service

Charley Harper was one of the most uniquely talented illustrators of the 20th century. From the 1950s up until his death in 2007, Harper created a seemingly endless amount of gorgeous posters and other illustrations depicting animals, plantlife, and other natural forms. Whereas many artists would put microscopic detail into their renderings of leaf veins and housefly eyeballs, Harper was more interested in the general geometric shapes of animals and plants, breaking them down to their most simple forms. He said he didn't count feathers, he counted wings.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Charley Harper completed ten posters for the US National Park Service, each focusing in on a specific ecosystem and its inhabitants. Prints of some of these are available online. Ask your buddy Google for help.







If you're serious about wanting to see more of Harper's beautiful artwork, Todd Oldham compiled a fantastic and gigantic book (over 400 pages!!!) which was released last year. It is available through YouWorkForThem