Pictorial Postmarks: Canada

Tatamagouche PO
236 Main St,
Tatamagouche, NS B0K 1V0

‘ANNA SWAN / Giantess’: portrait of a lady.

Charlottetown STN Central
101 Kent St,
Charlottetown, PE C1A 1M0

‘Est. 1835’; building.

I am pleased to announce this new addition to BP Place d'Armes which is located in Old Montreal:



This is the rendering of my final design:


[Note the font change -- this is because I didn't have the same font Canada Post design team has access to.]

As I was designing on the theme of 'Montreal + light', I came up with this concept inspired by the annual international fireworks competition held in Montreal's La Ronde -- an amusement park known for its roller coasters -- that is visible from the Old Port.

This is a very different kind of concept from the traditional cancel design that is primarily black on white; instead, mine is primarily white on black. No one was sure if it would work out, even though it passed Ottawa's approval. It turns out that one bar of the roller-coaster's rail was physically rendered as a very fine line on the rubber part of the cancel. This characteristic would make the roller-coaster looking almost like a line if the cancel sucks too much ink, or if the rubber gets dirty.





Originally, I made the 'POSTES CANADA POST' into one string that was meant to be read from left to right. This reading direction corresponds to the moving direction of the train, going up and down of the 'mountain' (in French, roller-coaster is called 'mountaine russe', literally 'Russian mountain'). But Canada Post may have set regulations on how their trademark is presented, they insisted on putting 'POSTES CANADA / CANADA POST' as a separate line.



My original design also contains 2 little details:

(1) The white space where the date of the cancellation is was rendered as a combination of 2 flags with curved edges. However, judging from the tiny size of this block, the curvedness of the lines wouldn't appear so clearly, so I decided to just cover that part with a white rectangle -- whatever it represents.



(2) The name of the post office is printed in stylished font of various height. These alphabets are meant to be the 'supports' underneath the roller-coaster.



Lastly, let me show you two premilinary designs at the brainstorm stage (they are not very pretty, I hope my reader can bear with me):

(a) This is an impossible design because the date rectangle was too low:



(b) Originally, I tried very hard to make the white rectangle 'looking integrated / natural' in the design. One of the versions I came up with was to cover the bottom part of the cancel with silhouettes of people. But again, this was abandonned as the rectangle has to be at about the centre.