Stamps can be tiny works of art. Art Director Ethel Kessler, of Kessler Design Group has perfected the art of stamp design, having created many of these tiny works for the United States Postal Service (USPS). We’ve collaborated on several stamps specifically designed to be used for wedding invitations. The 2011 wedding stamp, which will be released on April 21, is a “Forever” stamp (which isn’t a comment on the bonds of matrimony, but denotes the monetary value of the postage: “Forever,” it will correspond to the frequent increases in the USPS first-class postage rate).

Here are some previous wedding stamps that Ethel and I worked on together…

Although it seems that nowadays we all find fewer occasions to use USPS, mailed paper wedding invitations are still an important tradition. And, they still require a stamp as beautiful as the rest of the visual aspects of a well-planned wedding. Other classic, iconic wedding traditions are the rings and the cake. We featured each of them in past years’ wedding stamps.

The exquisite wedding cake may look familiar, as I featured it in my recent post on Peter Brett, the pastry chef who made it.

To learn more about stamp design from expert Ethel Kessler (who designed the original Breast Cancer Awareness stamp, among hundreds of others), see this Washington Post article, written on the 2008 release of her stamp to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s Disease.

To see all the new stamps scheduled for release in 2011, including some other beauties by Ethel Kessler, visit USPS’s website, Beyond the Perf, the online extension of their stamp catalogue, USA Philatelic.