Hasta La Ideas

“Beautiful things often happen when you don’t know anymore” (top) and “Don’t forget to dream” (bottom)

Art director Christian Borstlap has designed a new series of stamps in collaboration with a Dutch children’s welfare charity…

The Children’s Stamp is a charity focused on the promotion of children’s education. Working with the Dutch postal service TNT Post, the organisation has previously commissioned stamp sets that have helped to fund projects that support vulnerable children – the last of which raised more than 9.5m Euros for educational projects.

This year they approached Borstlap to create a set of stamps on the theme of “Let Children Learn.”

Borstlap took “the things you don’t learn from a book” as inspiration for his stamps, which each offer a visual piece of advice for young minds, “things that are perhaps more important than learning your four times table,” he says.

The advice includes: “Together is better”, “Trying is the same as learning” and, our favourite, “Something boring can be beautiful, if you look at it upside down.” Borstlap has also included the advice as a written list in the stamps’ sheet margin, so that people can match up the text with the graphics (which also appear in a book of postcards).

“The more you look, the more you understand” (half shown, top) and “Together is better” (bottom)

Additionally, the new stamps have also been brought to life in a sweet two minute animation by director, Paul Postma. 

Animation: Paul Postma Motion Design; Sound: Jasper Boeke; Music: Brother John by Clutchy Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin (Ubiquity Records, 2009)

Borstlap is a self-taught art director, designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in Wallpaper*, Nylon, Elle, and been used in campaigns for adidas, Albert Heijn and Selfridges. See more of his work at christianborstlap.com.