Pushing the Envelope

Dick Sheaff '66 puts art on letters.

RICHARD D. SHEAFF '66 has put his stamp on the U.S. Postal Service. Over 200 of them, in fact. Dick Sheaff himself is a rare issue: he designs postage stamps.

Sheaff branched into the field after a chance meeting with Howard Paine, a senior art director and avid collector of everything imaginable (as is Sheaff whose collections range from early American glass to bronze baby shoes to things carved from coal). Paine just happened to be an art director for the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee. The dozen or so committee members (including academics, laymen, a Hollywood star, and a leading sports personality) advise the postmaster general, approving subjects for stamps, assigning the work, and reviewing designs. Paine recommended Sheaff s design services to the committee.

Sheaff has art-directed more than 200 stamps since 1984, bringing together the various elements the concept, art, design, typography that go into the final image. He himself has designed or co-designed some 40 stamps—everything from Alfred Hitchcock to Norman Rockwell to Giotto's Madonnaand Child to Dartmouth's own Ernest Just 'O6. (No, Sheaff did not design the Daniel Webster stamp. That was the work ofjohn Scotford '38.)

Designing takes inspiration and instinct, Sheaff says. It also takes research. While art-directing a series of Civil War stamps he and a team of researchers pored over the details of uniforms, the time of day the battles occurred (to be sure the light would be right), even whether trees were on the battlefield. He tapped Civil War experts like Shelby Foote and found that history is a lot like art. "There is no set piece of history," Sheaff says, "It's largely interpretation."

Though "in awe" of stamps when he was a kid, the artistic muse did not take flight early for Sheaff. There were no dazzling crayon years in kindergarten, no Mozart-with-squeegee periods in fourth grade. He came to Dartmouth from Andover, Massachusetts, thinking medical school, not art studio, and majored in biology. Eventually, however, looking through microscopes gave way to looking at other things, and he was soon designing posters and logos and getting an M.A. in visual communications from Syracuse.

Sheaff founded his own design firm in Boston and built it up to a dozen employees with scores of clients. But after 19 years he gave up "meeting with suits" to do more design work of his own, which, increasingly, has been for the postal service. He continues making his stamp on the country from Scottsdale, Arizona, where he moved last fall with his wife and young son. Seeing his art on letters is more than "a thrill," he says. "A stamp is a little billboard for our government. It's a trip."

FRITZ HIER is the 1944 class secretary.

Dick Sheaffs stamp honoring Fulbright Scholarships, on the monitor, is one of his favorites. The stamps on these pages are Sheaff designs that won the postal stamp of approval.