The U.S. Postal Service Museum has a beautifully designed and highly informative and entertaining exhibit of stamps. The exhibit is titled “A-Z,” and it uses a typographically-diverse alphabet as the basis for telling the history of stamp and envelope design.
For each letter’s display, the designers created a theme that begins with the letter and provides a lens into history around the subject. The core content is displayed within a glassed display case set against a thematically driven background that sets of the various design elements around the content pieces.
Set within a large room, the cases are each mounted on the wall and ordered according to the alphabet. This ordering provides a familiar convention to follow if the visitor desires a linear experience, but the abstraction of each letter’s theme also allows a jump into any portion of the exhibit.
The thoughtfulness and quality of each display is evident. “E” for “EFOs,” or Errors Freaks and Oddities (a philatelic term) is self-referentially with offset colors along with the entire display border. “Local Posts” takes on a more mid-century homestead touch. The materials and layout are exciting for the eye and keep the visitor engaged in a new context and design for each new display case.
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