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The Postal Store®

Spooky Silhouettes

First Day of Issue Date: October 11, 2019

First Day of Issue Location: Milford, NH

About This Stamp

Halloween has long been a holiday that lets us delight in the things that scare us. These Spooky Silhouettes stamps offer fun, frightful scenes that symbolize this annual celebration.

These four stamps feature digital illustrations in which traditional Halloween motifs are rendered as black silhouettes in eerily backlit windows: a spider and a spider web against a red background; three bats against a purple background; a cat with an arched back beneath a raven perched on a bare tree branch, all against a yellowish-green background; and two ghosts against an orange background.

With customs and traditions that vary widely by community, Halloween now inspires parades and carnivals, corn mazes and haunted houses, neighborhood and school parties, pumpkin festivals, and even pumpkin-catapulting. No matter how or where people observe this ever-changing holiday in the early 21st century, Halloween remains a much-anticipated celebration of the macabre in the face of approaching winter.

Artist Tyler Lang created the artwork for these stamps. Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps.

These stamps are issued as Forever® stamps. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.

Stamp Art Director, Designer, and Typographer

Greg Breeding

Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.  

Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.

As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad. 

His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts. 

Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.

Stamp Artist

Tyler Lang

Born and raised in St. Albans, Vermont, Tyler Lang studied graphic design at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. After graduating in 2007, he moved to New York City to begin his professional art career, gaining skills at various design studios.

In 2009, Lang and his wife, Elsa, relocated to Portland, Oregon, and opened their own studio, Always With Honor. Their clients have included The New York Times, Toyota, Microsoft, WIRED, The Nature Conservancy, and Nike. Bold colors and simplified details characterize Lang’s work, which he describes as “communicating a sense of optimism and wonderment.” His personal interests in science and nature are apparent in many of his designs.

On the weekends, Lang can often be found exploring Oregon’s back roads with his wife and their Basset hound, Waldo. Despite his love of the Pacific Northwest, Lang will still only accept pure Vermont maple syrup on his pancakes.

Lang lives and works in Portland. His projects for the U.S. Postal Service® include Coastal Birds (2015), Coral Reefs (2019), and Spooky Silhouettes (2019).

First Day of Issue Ceremony

First Day of Issue Date: October 11, 2019
First Day of Issue Location: Milford, NH

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