The Community 21st Century US Postage Stamp Album

So, I finally sat down and did some work on the 21st Century US Postage Stamp Album I want to design to replace Volume 3 of my Mystic Heirloom album.

I have what can best be described as a "beta quality" supplement for 2001 complete.

Here is a screenshot of Page 1:



You can grab the PDF from here.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5n...?usp=sharing

Please feel free to provide any and all feedback.

Outstanding !

Very nice. If only I had that kind of talent. DD

Very nice album page!

However, I must point out a practical consideration:

The start of that 2001 Commemorative Page with the Lunar New Year Stamp is Scott #3500. Considering that as of 1/1/2013, we're now at Scott #4721 (Emancipation Proclamation Stamp) that's at least 1,221 stamps issued in the past 11 years which represents more than 244 album pages worth of stamps if only five stamps are placed on a page.

Since a typical album can house 100-125 pages (?), you're looking at two albums to store stamps for little more than a decade. At that rate, you'd have a library full of stamp binders to house all of the varieties of stamps that are continually being issued in increasing numbers.

Although the album pages certainly looks nice as shown, unless you have unlimited storage space, a practical consideration suggests that you would want to include a lot more stamps on each album page to make long term storage considerations more reasonable.

A very valid concern. I'll see what I can cram in.

So I just checked what Bill Steiner did with 2001, and he's at 15 pages with Duck stamps. And I am at 14 pages without duck stamps. So, we're the same in terms of page count. Looking through the pages, I really don't see a way to reduce the page count, mostly because of the Porky Pig and Prairie sheets. If someone could give me a page count for 2001 Scott National, I would appreciate it. I can get the Minuteman and Heirloom counts.

The National and Minuteman have the unfair advantage of being printed on larger page sizes.

The 2001 Scott National supplement contains 17 pages, 2 of which are replacement pages for 1995.

Your pages are outstanding. I really like the narrative for each issue. White Ace pages were nice to use, but I disliked all the color as well as the price!

Keep up the good work!

Lou

So, it seems 14-15 pages for 2001 may be about right. I managed to shave one more page out of the supplement, but page 1 looks really crowded when I did that.

Don't get me wrong. The page shown is great just as it stands. I was merely pointing out the real estate one would need to keep going at the rate of only five stamps per album page. If that's what the industry (Steiner, Minuteman, Mystic, etc.) does, than so be it. I guess we all just have to plan to add an additional binder every decade or so to accommodate all new issues.

On one hand it seems understandable given all of the new issues; on the other hand the US went more than a century with only needing to have one album to house their collection. Now we have 3 or 4 albums and every ten years we have to add another.

I guess it just goes to prove that new issues are getting well out of hand.

I'm ever so glad I stopped my collection in 1979! Reading through your statistics that's an absolute monster collection one would end up with!

Steiner does have more stamps per page than I do on a lot of pages, and less on others. With 2001 we have the added pain of not one, but two different Porky Pig sheets to deal with. I'm hoping the 2002 page count in a little less.

And, of course, the stamp box sizes are off by 1 or 2 mm on a lot of them. Cleaning up as we speak. Another day's delay before release...

One page left to go. I should have the final version up tomorrow.

Ok, last sanity check before I unleash upon the unwitting masses.

Any and all feedback appreciated.

http://stamphacks.com/usa_2001.pdf

And the "unless you don't like it, I'm releasing it" version.

Feedback requested:

http://www.stamphacks.com/usa_2001_ssp.pdf

Changes:

1. Font changed to Adobe San Source Pro
2. A lot of spacing issues fixed
3. Stamp Name font size changed from 14pt to 12pt to make it less odd
4. Section headers and stamp names are now bold instead of black.

Well, seems I never posed that 2001 was done and released. Go figure. The 2001 pages are on my blog here:

http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=596

And I have started work on 2002. He's a JPG of page 1.