To finish my third semester in the DMA program, the fourth and final project of DMA 214 was to design postage stamps which utilize typography and embrace culture of a specific location. I chose to design stamps for Puebla, Mexico. It’s a very cultural town at the heart of Mexico, and potentially where I’ll be studying abroad the coming summer.

My main takeaway from this project is that I’m now a lot more comfortable using Illustrator, and I’m starting to recognize its strengths compared to just using Photoshop. The first image was done solely in Illustrator, while the others were done in Photoshop. The stamps were easy to make, but if it wasn’t for Illustrator’s repeating copy paste possibilities, aspects such as the fence or arches would’ve taken ages to position in order to make them look nice. Biggest challenge would be coming up with the unique ideas. There’s some incredible postage stamps that I have seen in my life, and I think it’s an art of its own. There’s definitely room for more creativity and I look forward to coming back to a concept like this in the future. I focused heavily on typography and using font weight creatively to show importance of certain words. As for inspiration, there was tons.



The first stamp was based off the image above. Along with that, the colorful word Puebla is based off a sign that exists within the city with the same colors. The caption of the top right stamp (puebla has volcanoes) is based off my professor travelling to Puebla and actually seeing a volcano at dawn. Therefore, instead of waking up to birds chirping, waking up to a volcano is a thing. In the bottom images, I focused on Poblano peppers, which originate from the town of Puebla.

I enjoyed the assignment and loved mixing my two fields of DMA and Spanish to be a little bit creative. I didn’t get too creative with color schemes as most of them seemed out of place, but the one that I did find that worked, I stuck with.