FIG is an annual festival held in Liège, dedicated to contemporary graphic design practice. For its 2020 edition, Studio Studio was invited to design a postage stamp.
The postage stamp originated in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century as a means of regulating the transport of letters, sold at the symbolic price of one penny and printed using the intaglio process. The technique produced prints of unusually high precision, with line work fine enough to make the stamps difficult to copy or counterfeit, and that resistance to reproduction became part of what the format was for in the first place.
Studio Studio’s stamp is built around a single arrangement of lines that refers directly to the patterns generated by intaglio printing. Read flat, the lines form a graphic field. Read in transparency, against the light, they resolve into a hidden message: 1UNIT.
For more: research.
