Would You Call Personalized Postage a Digital Art Form?

Digital cameras have transformed the world of photography in a lot of marvelous ways. We send photos of our travels or the kids to our friends… we make photo-collages and scrapbooking pages… we upload our pictures to sites like Flickr where we can share them with the world.

And now postage is on the list of many things we can do with our digital images. We upload our files to Stamps.com, order our postage, and soon have them ready to send out. It’s great fun, but does that qualify personalized postage to be called art? If you call them art, would you also call a tshirt someone designed with an in-your-face political slogan a work of art?

No doubt people have been arguing about what art is for generations. Here’s what I think; see whether I can persuade you.

I didn’t think of personalized postage as art when I began this website. But as I have been researching the many ways people are using these stamps, I came across some writing on the design elements of a good photo stamp… hmm that sounds like an art discussion to me!

That got me thinking about just what the design elements for good postage are. I often suggest on this site that you keep it simple. Beyond that, there’s the matter of a pleasing balance of shapes and colors. Another factor is how the design looks on the corner of the envelope.. would it look better if you flipped left and right?

These things do fall into the categories of photography and the digital arts. I noticed that one day when I was submitting custompostage.net to a variety of website directories. Each directory had its own lists of categories and I had to choose one to put this site under. Photography seemed to be the best fit. If they had a further category called digital art, I used that.

That got me thinking about what I said at the start of this article, how personalized postage is part of the digital art explosion growing out of the ever-increasing use of digital cameras. Given all this, I have ended up feeling that while not all postageis particularly artistic, I would place the field of custom postage squarely within the field of art… digital art!