Phila. firm's stamps will live long in 'Trek' lore
FOREVER: That's how long the United States promises to deliver snail mail bearing commemorative stamps, in four bright new designs, recalling the Star Trek TV series, a racial- allegorical space opera set 300 years in the future when it debuted 50 years ago.
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FOREVER: That's how long the United States promises to deliver snail mail bearing commemorative stamps, in four bright new designs, recalling the Star Trek TV series, a racial- allegorical space opera set 300 years in the future when it debuted 50 years ago.
The stamps, two of which depict the Starship Enterprise and a traveler "beaming up," were designed in Old City at the Heads of State, a partnership formed by Hazelton native Jason Kernevich and South Jersey's Dustin Summers in 2002. They met as students and collaborators at Temple University's Tyler School of Art.
Kernevich and Summers caught a break that elevated their profile in 2008: They did the New York Times Sunday magazine cover illustrating Barack Obama's election, with the president's coat bleeding red stripes onto a flaglike field.
The designers' colorful travel and music-show posters, which he first saw in art journals, "demonstrated an ability to present complex ideas in simple, fresh illustrations," says Antonio Alcala, boss at Studio A in Alexandria, Va., one of four U.S. art directors who recommend commemorative-stamp designers to the U.S. Postal Service. He oversaw the Star Trek collaboration.
"Because a stamp has such a limited physical area to communicate the idea, it was important to me to hire an illustrator with familiarity and comfort using an abbreviated language," Alcala tells me. He wasn't looking for "typical Star Trek art" - just as well, since Kernevich and Summers weren't particularly fans.
"It was cool. Antonio wanted something vintage-y but not all nostalgic, something with a modern quality," Kernevich says.
Postal Service guidelines are "very thorough," Kernevich adds. "That did lead to a lot more refashions than we would normally do. But I guess that is to be expected when they are creating a piece of, well, currency."
"The main limitation we had to be aware of is how something can reduce to such a small size," he says. "Designing at that scale is a challenge we hadn't seen before. You have to limit the detail you can impart. Fine lines, small specs, doing it all in that kind of space."
The firm's second-floor studio location is auspicious: A visitor can look south to the old Market Street offices of Philadelphia's - later America's - postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, who got that job at a point in time more remote from the present day than Star Trek's fictional setting. It's also in the heart of the software start-up district the city calls "N3RD St.," though many of the first-floor storefronts on the block are vacant this winter.
Recent Heads of State projects were for clients such as Subaru of America and Spruce Street Harbor Park, plus a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts catalog in which the firm uses the rune- like letters architect Frank Furness had carved on the building front as a textual font, and covers for a British reissue of John Steinbeck novels.
These aren't the first Star Trek stamps. Larry Nemecek's Trekland blog, which calls the new stamps "crisp," notes that one in a 1998 postal series also depicted the Enterprise.
Minnesota philatelist and Star Trek fan Bill Kraft tells me he campaigned 13 years for that earlier version, collecting endorsements from scientists and the late science-fiction writers Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
"I didn't have to campaign this time," notes Kraft. The post office is now "hip to giving pop-culturists - and promotion-cooperative media - exactly the nostalgia they crave on a dwindling communication art form."
Forever?
215-854-5194@PhillyJoeD
Correction: The earlier version of this column named the wrong author for a set of book covers the agency is producing.