Neon Celebrate! Stamp

Do you send a lot of greeting cards? Or, do you have a party coming up for which you’re planning to mail invitations? Or, do you just have a reason to celebrate?

If so, the Neon Celebrate! stamp might be what you need to jazz up your envelopes.

The stamp was released on March 25, in Cleveland, Ohio, by the U.S. Postal Service. It is a Forever stamp,  priced at 44-cents and available in one design in a pressure-sensitive adhesive pane of 20 stamps, a strip of four stamps or a block of 10 stamps.

The Neon Celebrate! stamp was designed by Art Director Phil Jordan of Falls Church, Virginia. Inspired by a visit to the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles, Jordan began to think about the possibility of using neon to depict a stamp subject. He decided that a “Neon Celebrate!” stamp, with its imagery of vivid colors, fit the bill.

“Most neon is huge and stamps are so small,” said Jordan. “The mechanics would be a monumental challenge. Not everyone thought we could pull it off.”

After reviewing the work of a number of artists, Jordan chose Michael Flechtner to craft the U.S. Postal Service’s first neon stamp design. Interested in neon from an early age, Flechtner honed his glass-bending skills while working in a neon sign shop after graduate school, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture. This background enabled him to create neon tubing that depicted three-dimensional objects instead of the two dimensional forms typically found in signage and other graphic neon displays.

Working Flechtner of Van Nuys, California, they developed an exciting and vibrant stamp reminiscent of a fireworks display on a summer evening. Brilliantly colored images of swirls, circles and dashes in pink, blue, orange, yellow and green seem to erupt from the ground to illuminate the darkness. Each letter of the word “Celebrate” and the exclamation point that is part of this stamp’s official title, are highlighted in bright white light.

Flechtner came up with the idea for his stamp design while watching a fireworks display. “I felt that fireworks, with all their color, light, and motion, were the embodiment of a celebration,” he says. “Since neon is all about color and light, it was the perfect design for the medium.”

The 2011 Neon Celebrate! stamp is the first U.S. Postal Service project for Flechtner.

Other items for sale include the Digital Color Postmark for the 44-cent Neon Celebrate! for $1.50 and the First Day Cover for the 44-cent Neon Celebrate! for 82 cents.