PostNord’s new stamp series showcases five Swedish innovations: the pacemaker, solar-purified water, telecommunications, digital music streaming, and shared parental leave. The stamps required a simple visual language that could represent a series of five very different motifs, while still being intricate enough for each stamp to function as a standalone piece on an envelope.

What connects the five innovations is that they all, in one way or another, send signals out into the world. Whether it’s a telephone exchange that literally transmits signals, or shared parental leave making waves in society, the idea remains the same. The project was therefore named Making Waves, and a wave-based illustration style was developed to represent the different innovations.

The limited surface area of the stamp required the motifs to be simple, yet sufficiently figurative to clearly distinguish the five innovations. The execution of the line-based illustrations conveys waves, and a total of nine different colors are used to print the five motifs. The result is a cohesive series of five stamps, where each motif must interact with the others while also being able to stand on its own.