Advice Needed For Our Pictoral Postmark And Envelope

I need some advice for our pictoral postmark that we have coming out in May. It pertains to personal preferences. Do collectors prefer the business letter size envelope or a normal letter size? We are planning to have a special envelope design to go with our pictoral postmark.

Also do collector prefer color designed envelopes or black and white?


-RKO
"Live from Cape Canaveral"

I have a box of hundreds of pictorial cancels. From browsing through them, my only tiny piece of advice is to consider the width of the line(s) depicting the subject matter, as well as the saturation of the font. Too wide a line, when transformed into an imaged cancellation, makes for a blurry often-overinked mess. The type of ink probably matters too; some spread out, others make a crisp clear imprint. Others look great on bond-paper envelopes, but blur on cheap slick envelopes.

Here are (in my opinion) some bad examples:

Thanks so those are bad examples of the pictoral postmark cancellation
or bad examples of the cachet design of the envelope?

The soldiers carrying the flags looked pretty good from what I can tell. Most of them are B&W apart from the maple leaf which is monochrome anyway.

Maybe using color on the cachet design takes away from the stamps, do you think?

-RKO

The "soldiers carrying flags" is a professional engraved cachet by ArtCraft, designed for the normal first day cover, not for a specific pictorial cancel, so you would expect those to be superior.

I don't think color matters one way or the other, but the price may curb your enthusiasm.

I posted those 6 as examples of poor pictorial cancellation design, nothing to do with the cachet. They are too "busy," with too much heavy text, and try to be everything to everybody, all in one shot. The DuPont station has to be one of the worst I've ever seen.

Incidentally, if there's a PP collector here, email me and I will quote on my duplicates, most of which are on postal stationery, which I think adds interest.