Design Successes and Failures
In the end, successful stamp designs receive relatively little notice from the general public, but considerable praise from the philatelic press. Publications such as Linn's Stamp News will headline the most interesting new stamps on their front page, and report the results of popularity polls.
On the other side, design errors regularly get through the multiple stages of review and checking. Errors have ranged from minute points of rendition (such as the subtly-reversed ears on an Austrian stamp of the 1930s), to misrepresentations of disputed territory in maps, to mistaken text ("Sir Codrington" on 1920s Greece), to the truly spectacular, such as the US "Legends of the West" sheet using the picture of the wrong person. See stamp design error for further detail.
Another category of failure includes designs that are simply rejected by the stamp-buying public. The 1970s-era anti-alcoholism stamp of the US is a well-known example; it consists merely of the slogan "Alcoholism: You Can Beat It!", which must have looked good during the design process, but affixed to the corner of an envelope it suggests that the recipient is an alcoholic in need of public encouragement, and few people ever used this stamp on their mail.
Read more about this topic: Postage Stamp Design
Famous quotes containing the words design, successes and/or failures:
“What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Small successes are still successes; great failures are still failures.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)