Typically Dutch - Museums

On 2 January 2023, PostNL will publish the Typically Dutch – museums stamp sheet. This issue is the first in the Typically Dutchseries this year. The multi-annual series started in 2020 and, in 2023, will be dedicated to a variety of sights and attractions that are significant for and typical of the Netherlands. The six identical postage stamps will be marked ‘Nederland 1’, the denomination for items weighing up to 20g destined for the Netherlands. The Typically Dutch – museums issue was designed by senior graphic designer Adam Lane and creative director Edwin van Praet from Total Design in Amsterdam. Later on this year, the series will continue with the subjects mills (13 February), flower fields (20 March), cheese markets (15 May) and wadden (14 August).

The Netherlands loves a museum. It has many hundreds of museums attracting many millions of visitors, many of whom visit from abroad. The oldest museum is the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (1784), while the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (1885) attracts the most visitors. Museums in our country come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with collections on all kinds of subjects: archaeology, architecture, design, photography, history, music, war, religion, painting, sports, technology, transport, ethnography and much, much more. There is even a book dedicated to the Netherlands’ smallest museums, including the Electro Radio Nostalgia Museum, Jannie's Cow Museum and the Apple Museum Nederland. Set against these museums for small groups of enthusiasts are the big crowd-pleasers. In order of most visited, these are the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House, the Zaanse Schans, the EYE Film Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Kunstmuseum and the Dutch Open Air Museum. There are many other noteworthy museums in the Netherlands, such as the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg, the Catharijneconvent Museum in Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, the Archaeological Open Air Museum in Lelystad, the Drents Museum in Assen, the National Museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden and the Groninger Museum. The museum as we know it today – a building containing one or more collections of art objects – originates in the Renaissance and was later expanded to include things like objects related to natural history and technological history. By the way, the word museum comes from the Greek word mouseion. This was a site or temple dedicated to the muses, the goddesses of the arts.

The stamps of the Typically Dutch - museums stamp sheet feature different sizes of picture frames and vases, symbolising the subject of this issue. The iconic shapes are grouped in a tight pattern across the stamps. The pattern is interrupted on the sheet edge. The background of the stamp sheet and stamps is a light shade of grey-blue. The other colours tie in with this colour: a darker shade of grey-blue for the smaller vase and the inside of the picture frames, dark yellow for the frames themselves and light yellow for the larger vase and the portrait in the oval frame. Along the bottom of each stamp runs a white strip containing the sorting hook, the year 2023, the country (Nederland) and the denomination (1). The logo for the Typically Dutch series is printed above each stamp, with a folded Dutch banner on the left and right. The Typically Dutch logo appears once more on the top edge of the sheet, while the right edge features a short explanatory text. The title of this issue on museums in the Netherlands is printed in light yellow on the sheet border between the large pictorial logo at the top of the stamp sheet and the stamps. The Nexa Thin and Nexa Rust (Svet Simov, Fontfabric, 2012) fonts have been used for the text on the stamps and stamp sheet.

The 2023 stamps for the multi-annual Typically Dutch series were once again designed by Total Design from Amsterdam. The design concept behind the latest stamp sheets takes us back in time. In 2021, Total Design developed presentations for the 2022 Typically Dutch series, suggesting Dutch sports and Dutch festivals as possible themes. ‘At the time, the choice was sports,’ explains creative director Edwin van Praet. ‘One of the reasons being almost all festivals had been cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. Our design proposal for the festivals featured all kinds of iconic shapes, to which PostNL had responded very positively. Needless to say, everyone was incredibly enthusiastic when we proposed applying this iconic design language to the theme of Typically Dutch in 2023: the huge variety of attractions and sights our country has to offer.’

Mood boards
As with previous issues for the Typically Dutch series, Total Design’s designers first created a number of mood boards to explore the subject matter. Senior graphic designer Adam Lane of Total Design: ‘We looked for iconic shapes that best matched the sights we wanted to showcase. For the museums, we picked frames that contain paintings, for the windmills we picked sails, for the flower fields geometric flower shapes, for the cheese markets the wagon wheel shapes of hard cheeses and for the wadden mud flats shoe prints in the mud.’

Naturally flowing patterns
While searching for images for the mood boards, Lane stumbled upon the work of Orla Kiely, a fashion designer who works with simple yet impressive floral patterns. ‘That sparked something in me. I wanted to reflect that feeling by incorporating the icons within patterns, within an illustrative structure for the overall stamp sheet. This is reinforced by the fact that the pattern continues from one stamp to the next and also across the sheet edge. Of course, within that continuous pattern, we had to design six equal stamps. Which involved a lot of fitting and measuring. Because the image must be exactly the same within the rectangle of each stamp, while, at the same time, you want to create a beautiful and natural flowing pattern on the sheet. On the sheet edge, you can see how we interrupt the pattern to realise an exciting overall picture.’

Use of colour
When you put the final five stamp sheets together you will clearly see the similarities in the use of colour. Lane: ‘Because they are fairly soft colours. Not too much contrast, not too vivid. Otherwise, it would be too in your face. In principle, we did not want to use more than three different colours per stamp sheet, but it was not a hard and fast rule. The use of similar colours for all stamp sheets also reinforces the ‘family’ feel that a series should have; they should feel related to each other. The same goes for the visual language: as simple and geometric as possible, but still easily recognisable. This way, we managed to design stamps with powerful images that fit within the pattern. Every single stamp has a strong design while the story behind the theme remains legible.’

Content
According to Van Praet, it is not just form that dominates the stamp sheet; the design concept also takes content into account. ‘That applies to all stamp sheets that are being published in the Typically Dutch series this year. Including this issue about the museums. It doesn’t matter which museum you visit, curators have always chosen a deliberate pattern for the way paintings are hung on the wall, for example. And even when they are putting their collection together, museums naturally follow a particular pattern.’

Sunflowers
When creating the design of Typically Dutch – museums Van Praet and Lane first took a completely different route. ‘We created a lot of different versions for this issue. We started with the idea of using Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum as our subject, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. So we chose Van Gogh’s famous sunflower painting as the basis for the iconic shapes. On reflection, focusing on a specific museum turned out to not to fit in with the other topics – windmills, cheese markets, flower fields and the wadden – in this year’s series after all.’

Frames and vases
So we needed to take a different approach. Lane: ‘So we started brainstorming about what is actually iconic about museums in general. Which was tricky, because there are so many different kinds of museums. In the end, we found a common factor on the list: museums display paintings, photographs and the like to the public. And because museums do not only exhibit paintings, we added two types of vase. These represent the other objects that museums may have in their collections.’ According to Van Praet, the vases were not chosen at random. ‘Think of it as a nod to our earlier experiments with Van Gogh’s sunflowers. The flowers have disappeared, the vases are still there. The same applies to the colours. They are taken from the painting with the sunflowers in the Van Gogh museum.’

About the designers
Adam Lane (Hemel Hampstead, UK, 1994) studied graphic design at Southampton Solent University (UK), where he graduated with first-class honours in 2016. He then moved to Amsterdam to join Total Design, successively as an intern, junior graphic designer and senior graphic designer. Lane is part of the Branding Team at Total Design.

Edwin van Praet (Breda, 1971) studied graphic and typographic design at the Academy of Art and Design St. Joost in Breda. After graduating, he worked as a graphic designer at Tel Design in The Hague for seven years. In 2003, he joined Total Identity/Total Design, first as a Senior Designer and now as Creative Director. Van Praet is part of the Branding Team at Total Design. He has won many awards for his work in both national and international design competitions. For PostNL, Van Praet previously designed the 100 years of aviation (2019) stamps and the stamps in the Typically Dutch series featuring typically Dutch dishes (2020), house types and façades that are typical for the Netherlands (2021) and typical Dutch sports (2022).

About the agency
Total Design is not only a name - it also describes how the agency works. Total Design represents an integrated approach, which produces result-oriented, surprising and iconic solutions for every project. Total Design was founded in 1963 as a unique creative collective and works with both young talents and experienced individuals from various disciplines. Strategists work together with developers, branding experts and storytellers in an open playing field to collectively fulfil customers’ goals.