Colophon
The archive is set in Helvetica, in two weights and no italic. Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann drew it in 1957 for the Haas type foundry, where it was released as Neue Haas Grotesk. It is the only family on the site: headings, records, caps lines and the search field are all the same face at different sizes, because a page of stamps has enough voices in it already. The one italic anywhere here is the title of a cited work.
The interface is black on white and nothing else. Color belongs to the stamps. Where a vocabulary color appears — a chip, a tile on the wall, the band on a color page — it is the measured ink, never a ground for text. State is shown by weight, by the thickness of a rule and by inversion; the only movement on the site is a 120-millisecond fade on hover.
- Type
- Helvetica, 400 and 700, self-hosted as WOFF2
- Built with
- Next.js · Payload CMS · Postgres · sharp
- Hosted on
- Vercel, with the media on Supabase Storage
- Color
- Measured off each scan in CIELAB, then confirmed by a cataloger
- Public domain
- Read from Wikimedia Commonsrevision 1198039080
Scans are the archive’s own unless a line under the image says otherwise; where an image comes from somewhere else, that line names the source and its license. Text quoted from Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons is shown with its own credit and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
No third-party scripts run on these pages at all: no advertising, no tracking pixel, and nothing that follows a reader off the site.