I was reading Wired today, and they featured a story on Stamps.com and their new “personalized photo stamps” program, called PhotoStamps. As you can imagine, this could be either quite cool (and useful for us design types) or extremely cheesy and lame. I’m excited, because I can picture getting stamps made with my company logo on them, thus controlling another aspect of the identity. Nothing worse that a nicely designed company envelope, with requisite matching letterhead, marred by a stamp featuring the fat Elvis (unless, of course, that fits your theme).
Of course, you have to know that the far-flung majority of these stamps won’t be something cool (at least by our elitist design standards). The CEO of Stamps.com explained that:
The majority of stuff that’s coming in is exactly what we intended. Pictures of babies is [sic] No. 1. Pictures of families or babies make up about two-thirds of what’s come in.
Which is about what you’d expect, right? I mean, I can see the day when one of my siblings finally becomes a parent. Every bit of postal correspondence will be slathered with stamps featuring lil’ Suzie’s toothless grin. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that; however, think of the postal workers. How long before millions of tacky stamps start affecting them subconsciously? I’m sure we’re all worried about our nation’s postal workers enough already…
