Nicky Dyer

CLIENT: NEW ZEALAND POST

Project: 5 year programme to commemorate WW1

This was a fairly mammoth undertaking — To commemorate 100 years since WW1 each year from 2014-2018 with a comprehensive range of coin and stamp products and associated collateral.

New Zealand Post approached us to put forward a pitch for this project. I was fairly excited as it meant digging into archives, researching and finding a great way to tell stories.

Approach —

My vision was to bring stories of every-day real New Zealanders to the forefront, to tell what it was like for those at War, and those at home. To bring out the hidden stories, those untold, in a way that would be relatable to the general public. Many New Zealanders have family that were in the war, grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers.

(I’ve only shown one years product here as there is so much!)

Stamps + Booklets

To add layers and context to these important stories, a variety of media was researched and photographed or scanned for use in the product. This ranged from photographs to postcards, letters, diaries, illustrations, war art, news clippings, to historic posters.  This in itself tells a very rich story of what life was like in war time New Zealand and globally.

As there needed to be a high degree on continuity for the set to make it cohesive as a collectors set I designed all collateral for each of the 5 years up-front. The themes for each year were mapped out in advance to ensure we could tell a broad story covering all aspects of Army, Navy, Airforce and Civilians as comprehensively as the collateral would allow.

Our researcher (Thank you Aaron Brown!!) then needed to find actual images, letters, and real items for us to either scan or photograph each year to fill in the story.

Each year we then just had to grade and insert the imagery we’d found into the pre-laid up art in the chosen colour theme for that year and produce! We researched a lead person each year and found their families so we could tell a real story in miniature booklets around each key person. These chosen people were normal everyday people that served in the war, some famous, some not — it paints a really rich picture for us of how war affected everyone.

Most of the team at NZ Post and the agency where I worked remained on the project for all of the 5 years. I worked on the project for 4 years… I didn’t quite make it to the 5th year, but as I’d already designed the system I was confident the final year could roll out in a cohesive way without me there — phew!

Coins —

Each of the coins also told an independent story from the stamps.

Circular set — This featured the transportation used during the war. Planes, Tanks, Horses etc etc. and to keep with the personal relatable aspect we featured people with each transport type, who was a mounted infantry, who was a pilot? Etc.

Gold and Silver coins — For these sets we chose a theme that showed an ‘away scene’ and an ‘at home scene’ on each coin and we picked overarching big stories of key moments in the way and featured people and scenes from those moments.

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Stamp and Coin product began being launched in 2014 and has now rolled out each of the 5 years in the programme concluding in 2018. Products are available for order on New Zealand Posts, stamps and coin website.

It has been a great privilege to conceptualise and work with the team at New Zealand Post and to meet many of the relatives of the families depicted in each years stamp sets in person. To hear stories from them first hand, passed down was informative and emotional, it really makes you think about our place in the world.

Products designed —

Stamp product: 10 stamps x 5 sets, 2x miniature sheets x 5 sets, First Day Covers x2 x5 sets, Date stamps x 5, Miniature booklets x 5 + Miniature Booklet Box x 1.

Coin Product: 5 coin silver set x 1, 1 x silver coin x 5, 1 x gold coin x 5, Tins to house coin sets each year, Silver x 5, Gold x 5, 1 times circular.

Collaborators: Researcher: Aaron Brown. Illustrator: Stephen Fuller (Ilustrated all coin product stories) NZ Post Team, Alan Hollows, Helcia Knap and Simon Allison. Copywriters: Sarah Laing, Mark DiSoma. Designer — Nicky Dyer.