Art Direction, Design and the Magic Touch
Stamps and print products that elevate the art of magic
In an age when everything in the natural world is seemingly explainable, old-fashioned sleight of hand still delights us. As we witness a mesmerizing card trick or watch a dove materialize under a handkerchief, we think, Wait a minute: Maybe the world isn’t so predictable after all…
The U.S. Postal Service sought to channel this enduring delight in magic with the 2018 Forever stamps Art of Magic. I had the privilege of serving as the art director for these stamps, working with the illustrator Jay Fletcher on the design.
Designing magical stamps
Jay brought an impeccable aesthetic sensibility and level of experience to this project: He’s worked extensively with theory11, a community of magic creators and purveyor of luxury playing cards, and he was game for the design challenge of translating the appeal of magic to postage stamps.
“I was thrilled when I heard about this project,” Jay said. “Designing a stamp is a bucket-list project for any designer.”
The stamps, proposed by my friend BJ Bueno, a magician in his own right and a member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, would represent five primary categories of magic: production, prediction, levitation, vanishing and transformation. Jay and I discussed the challenge of how these abstract concepts could be communicated through the miniature canvas of the stamp, reckoning with the need to show movement and wonder in a small, fixed image.
We landed on depictions of five classic tricks for the final stamps: a rabbit in a top hat, a fortune teller with a crystal ball, a woman levitating, a cage that once held a bird, and a white dove that seemingly materialized from a rose. I’m delighted with how the stamps turned out, and Jay’s visual approach struck the perfect balance between vintage and modern. The stamps harken back to magic posters of a bygone era while simultaneously capturing the attention of a 21st-century audience with graphic simplicity.
“Everybody was really trusting,” Jay said. “I felt like I was able to take ownership of the design, and I’m super-proud of how we identified the various challenges and solved them. We packed a lot into something pretty tiny, and I love the general vibe of the final stamps.”
Capturing wonder and awe in a postal product
But Jay hadn’t heard the last of it from us at Journey Group. Our print studio, led by creative director Mike Ryan, was tasked by the U.S. Postal Service to create a collectible product to celebrate the Art of Magic stamps; they urged the team to think beyond the typical collectible folio format and push into something inventive and surprising.
Magic presents a tremendous amount of creative opportunity, particularly when you consider the sheer quantity of magic-related products in the marketplace. Our team needed to devise a print product that would showcase the stamps but also bring the subject to life for a broad audience of collectors and enthusiasts. The print studio began to research the kinds of magic products that were popular, and one afternoon, our accounts director brought in a “magic box” belonging to his children. The box had a “hidden” compartment that made the contents seemingly disappear. This sparked the print studio’s imagination to create a paper version of that box to contain a fully designed do-it-yourself magic kit.
We wanted a magic kit that could teach five tricks related to the stamp art, but we weren’t magicians. We needed to find an expert in the field. BJ Bueno pointed us to magician Mac King, a pro at explaining magic tricks to a wide audience, and Mac generously agreed to work with us to create a guide to five brand-new tricks that could be performed with a gaffe deck of high-end cards that we’d design.
The print studio team called Jay again, and he was eager to help. “I’ve done so many decks of cards for theory11 that I’m pretty comfortable in that world,” he said. “And working with everybody at Journey Group was awesome. I could tell that everyone trusted me from the start.”
Several design challenges confronted the team as they pulled the product together. The guide needed to visually represent each of the five tricks, so Journey Group designers illustrated each of Mac King’s tricks and consulted with him to ensure that each one was clearly and accurately depicted. Fitting all of the elements into the kit itself was another challenge, and the team designed a spacer in the box that could be both aesthetically pleasing but hold all of the contents neatly together. The box itself was a three-dimensional puzzle to solve, and we worked closely with our long-term partners at Worth Higgins & Associates, who were instrumental in helping prototype the box and the insert.
Jay brought energy and enthusiasm to the entire project, and the resulting magic kit includes stamps, mounts, a card deck and a guide to the tricks — all contained in the magic box. Due to requests for more related to the stamps from Jay’s fans and followers, we also produced five screen-printed posters of each of the stamp designs, which can be purchased individually or as a set in the Postal Store. Jay signed every poster, and each one is numbered, creating artwork that functions as a beautiful, one-of-a-kind keepsake.
As a fitting curtain call to the entire project, in early August, Mike and I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the First Day of Issue ceremony for the Art of Magic stamps. The ceremony coincided with the MAGIC Live convention, which hosted a tremendous number of magicians, who were very excited about the stamps and accompanying products. The Postal Service sold out of everything they brought to the convention.
And David Copperfield himself was a surprise guest at the ceremony. We watched him introduce the stamps to the audience of fellow magicians, saying, “Magic can inspire, enlighten and unite as a rare and valuable art form, so I’m happy to be part of the unveiling of this very special collection.” In my years as an art director, I never thought I’d hear David Copperfield review my work, but, hey, I’ll take it.
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