Designing Day of the Dead Stamps
“We don’t have to be afraid”
Like many other Mexicans in his home city of Tijuana, stamp designer Luis Fitch grew up celebrating Halloween, not Day of the Dead. But he had friends from the central region of Mexico who observed the holiday, and he later made its festive aesthetic a signature part of his illustration style.
Today, Luis Fitch is the co-founder and creative director of the cross-cultural design agency UNO Branding. He told us the story of how he became the illustrator for the Day of the Dead stamps.
“When I was 18, we moved to San Diego, and I tried to convince the Post Office to let me design a stamp. I’d been collecting stamps for a long time, and since I was 14, I’d also been doing branding for businesses: I had already designed hundreds of logos. Every two days, I would go to the Post Office downtown and ask, ‘How do you design a stamp? How do you design a stamp?’ They finally gave me a pamphlet stating the rules, which are that you have to submit a portfolio, and that was the end of it.
“Decades later, I went to a conference and heard designer Gail Anderson talk about the stamp she had helped create for the U.S. Postal Service. I hadn’t thought about stamp design for 37 years, but I decided I was finally going to submit my work. Guess what happened the next day? [Stamp art director Antonio Alcalá] calls me. He tells me about the Day of the Dead stamps and says, ‘Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Of course I’m interested, I’ve been waiting for this call since I was 18!’
“I’ve been studying and creating art inspired by Day of the Dead for years — I have a digital folder with about 2,000 of my own flowers, skeletons, and borders that I use in my illustrations. Antonio asked me to design one stamp, but I ended up doing four, because it needed to be a whole family: the mom, the dad, the daughter, and the son. During Day of the Dead celebrations, you remember your family members who have died: You play the person’s favorite music at night in the cemetery, you bring their favorite food or tobacco or other things they loved.
“That’s the pillar of Mexican culture: family. I feel proud that I was able to design the stamps, mainly for our culture. Hopefully, when people get them in the mail, they’ll wonder, ‘What is this?’ And they’ll learn something. We’re often afraid of other cultures because we don't understand them, but we don’t have to be afraid. That’s what Day of the Dead is all about. We don’t have to be afraid of death — we can laugh about it. We can commemorate it and celebrate it.”