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new work – Royal Mail Christmas Competition stamp pack.

Christmas seems to have come early at totalcontent. Last week we brought you Royal Mail's Madonna and Child stamp presentation pack. This week, we unwrap the children's Christmas stamp competition pack, charmingly designed by our good friends at NB Studio.

Here, we were asked to tell the story of the nationwide hunt for designs striking enough to grace first- and second-class during the 2013 festive period. The challenge was open to children in the UK aged 4–11, and there were prizes of £100, £500 and £1000 to be won. This is only the third time Royal Mail have staged a kids' stamp competition, and the response was overwhelming, with over 240,000 entries covering all kinds of Yuletide subject matter in every conceivable style.

Read on...

new work – Royal Mail Christmas 2013 presentation pack.

I’m really pleased to have contributed to this rather classy pack showcasing this year’s Madonna and Child Christmas stamps. The set of five (plus two extended large-letter stamps) feature depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus through the ages, as well as a specially commissioned (and strikingly beautiful) new painting by neo-Coptic artist Fadi Mikhail, which sits on the £1.88 stamp. I helped Royal Mail tell Fadi’s story, including his tutelage under neo-Coptic master Isaac Fanous; his process and thinking; and the heavy symbolism of this very prescribed genre of painting. On the reverse side of the sheet, there’s a potted history of Madonna and Child paintings by art historian Rowena Loverance. You can get hold of a special Christmas presentation pack, designed by Robert Maud and Sarah Davies here. Or of course, pick up Christmas stamps for all your cards from your local Post Office.

new work – Royal Mail 2012 Year Pack.

The Royal Mail Year Pack is the feisty little brother of the Year Book. It includes all the past year’s pictorial stamps, plus a quick run-down on the subject that inspired them. This is the tenth one I’ve written, and while it’s not a Marathon like the Year Book, it’s still a testing 1500 metres. You have around 200 words to cover anything from Space Science to Charles Dickens to British comics. Which means keeping the words punchy yet informative, finding an interesting angle, and casting a small but incisive spotlight on the subject in hand.

For the designer, it’s an equally demanding task. They need to encapsulate the visual spirit of 100 or so stamps on the front and back of a simple fold-out. This year, Magpie Studio did a sterling job of not only of bringing such disparate material together, but also in expressing a sense of British pride in the year of the Golden Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

Read on...

new work – Royal Mail Olympic stamp pack.

“You might think the Olympic Games are all about being number one. But that’s only a small fraction of the story…”

How timely... on Day 5 of the London Games, we bring you our latest effort for Royal Mail. Part of a series of commemorative philatelic goodies, ‘Welcome to the 2012 Olympic Games’ is a special stamp pack that takes a look at the impressive facts and figures behind the XXX Olympiad, and the city of London itself. It houses a miniature sheet with four stamps designed by hat-trick, who also created the pack. I was charged with writing a narrative which tied all the key numbers together in an enlightening and entertaining way. If you want to read the full text (you know you do), you can view a pdf on the downloads page of this site. And if you’re suitably impressed, you can always buy the pack from the Royal Mail shop.

stamp of approval.

I’ve written plenty of words about stamps for Royal Mail, and I’ve contributed to Design Week’s Vox Pop several times. But you could have knocked me down with a feather when my name appeared in an answer to the question...

‘Who in the design industry would you like to see celebrated in stamp form?

Here’s what Phil Jones, founder of Real Time Consultancy and old friend had to say:

I live in Bloomsbury and my house has a blue plaque on it for the writer Dorothy Sayers who lived here in the 1930s. Other houses around my area have the same blue plaques recognising great writers, Charles Dickens in the next road to me for instance. Wouldn’t it be nice if we recognised the writers who make the design industry tick? Every annual report, brochure, ad campaign is written by great wordsmiths and many of them are unsung heroes. People like Patrick Baglee, Jim Davies, Tim Rich etc., are worth their weight in gold and how nice if we saw them smiling back at us from a stamp?

Thanks Phil, always good to feel appreciated.

new work – Royal Mail.

Another Royal Mail commission for Jim, this one a stamp presentation pack marking the issue of definitive stamps for the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

Jim’s pack commentary considers the Games’ broad visual identity and how this reflects its ambitions for inclusivity and legacy. It explores the background and varied application of the much-debated Wolff-Olins designed emblem. It looks back to the circumstances and high points of previous London Olympics. And it picks out classic logos from the past — including every graphic designer’s choice, Otl Aicher’s black-and-white crown of rays for the Munich Olympics of 1972.

The pack was designed by Dana Robertson of Neon Creative, our first collaboration with the former Partners CD. The Olympic and Paralympic definitive stamps will be available from January until the end of the Games in July. And you can buy a copy of the presentation pack here.

a great lick.

I don’t want to come over as some sad old stamp geek, but thanks to a long association with Royal Mail Design, I’ve learned a thing or two about this minuscule art form. Strict rules about what you can and can’t do with the look and form of a stamp are gradually being loosened in an effort to attract younger collectors, and the January 2010 stamp issue by Studio Dempsey continues to push the boundaries.

The set features classic British record sleeves, including the seminal London Calling by The Clash, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Blur’s Parklife and Led Zeppelin II. I was among of a group of designers and music journalists to help draw up a shortlist for Royal Mail, and I’m glad to see that several of my suggestions made the cut. Mike Dempsey has cleverly played with the form of both the stamp and the sleeve, with a small crescent of record poking out of the right-hand side. Let’s hope the younger audience appreciate what this curious black stuff is.

Personally, I’ll be buying as many Clash stamps as I can get my hands on. The iconic Pennie Smith photo of Paul Simenon smashing his bass still has immense power, and the type design by Ray Lowry – a homage to an earlier Elvis album – creates the perfect frame. Along with his many other achievements – bassist, artist, coolest man on Earth – Simenon becomes one of the first recognisable living people to appear on a British stamp. Until recently, only members of the Royal Family were accorded that honour. To see all the other classic British album sleeve stamps, check the Creative Review blog. God Save the Queen.

new work – Royal Mail.

It’s finally out. The mighty, 64-page 2009 Royal Mail Yearbook represents around four months of Jim’s working life across this year and last – and goes some way to account for the recent dearth of entries on this section of the website.

But flicking through page after handsome page, the effort seems more than worthwhile. This year’s 14 stamp issues included British Design Classics, Mythical Creatures, Naval Uniforms and the Industrial Revolution, and the Yearbook delves into many of their more interesting nooks and crannies. We came up with the title ‘Feed Your Mind – A Great British Miscellany’ because of the bite-size editorial style, which cherry picks obscure facts and stories to bring each subject to life. It also fits in with the slightly unsettling custom-made phrenology head on the front and back covers.

The designers, hat-trick, have done a grand job… they went for a ‘more is more’ approach, scatter-gunning many smaller subjects around a central theme and packing each spread with visual interest and graphic wit. The result is busy and intriguing, a dippable smorgasbord of a book rather than a meaty read.

The results speak for themselves, but the ambitious approach made for a research-intensive project, with Jim needing to get to grips with from everything from the rules of jousting, to the myth of the Giant’s Causeway, to the most people to fit into a phone box, to the Burns poem Tam O’Shanter. And plenty more besides. We’ll be posting more spreads and details when we get them.

This is Jim’s fifth Royal Mail Yearbook, and he’s just been commissioned to write his sixth for next year. Hat-trick will be designing again. You can get hold of your very own copy here.

new work – Royal Mail.

Royal Mail is celebrating 20th-century British ingenuity and innovation with a set of 10 ‘design classics’ stamps published on 13 January. Debate on what to feature must have raged long and hard, but the final shortlist included stalwarts like the Spitfire and the Mini, alongside more quirky choices like the Anglepoise lamp and Robin Day’s Polyprop chair.

The impeccably designed stamp images were art directed by HGV, while totalcontent provided two separate commentaries for a dinky ‘prestige stamp book’ and a presentation pack. Both texts describe and contextualise the significance of the designs, and explain how they managed to book their place in history. And you can get your hands on these must-have collectables here.

new work – Royal Mail.

totalcontent has written Royal Mail’s Year Pack for the third consecutive year. This is a collection of the year’s ‘special’ stamp issues (the ones with the pictures on them) together with short commentaries on each of the featured subjects.

The 2008 pack, designed by The Chase, uses the conceit of a perforated, stamp-like picture frame to crop and outline part of a larger photographic image. Arresting and surreal, the large-than-life frames capture a field of poppies, a sheep dog, a life boat and an ant, among other things.

For us, it meant researching and bringing to life a typically arcane group of subjects, including cathedrals and pantos, air shows and horror films. And we’ve just been asked to do next year’s too.

new work – Royal Mail.

The Royal Mail Year Pack is a whistle-stop tour through all the sets of British picture stamps published in the course of the year. You get a full set of all the stamps, plus a pull-out guide on the subject matter that inspired them.

totalcontent was asked to provide the commentary for the True North-designed pack, which meant delving into all sorts of arcane areas, from marine life and astronomy, to army uniforms and endangered species. Taking in Grand Prix and the Beatles along the way.

It looks like we did a reasonable job – we’ve just been commissioned to write another Year Pack for 2008. Bring it on.

new work – Royal Mail.

Yes, it’s absolutely true. Jim’s first two initials are JK. And he went to the same university as JK Rowling. So it seemed somehow appropriate when Royal Mail asked him to write the stamp pack copy for the much-anticipated Harry Potter postage stamps.

Celebrating the release of the final book in the saga, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, these stamps feature illustrated front covers of the seven novels that have made themselves a fixture in popular culture.

Jim’s brief was to bring the story of the world’s greatest publishing phenomenon to life, from the early struggles to the later record-busting success. And to look back at how the bespectacled boy wizard became the best-loved character in modern fiction. His efforts were approved by JK herself – strange to think of her reading our words. You can order a Harry Potter stamp pack here.