mail : The Art of Non-Conformity

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52-Week Art Project Creates Illustrative Postcards About Life

Who doesn't like getting hand-written postcards?

Designers Giorgia Lupi + Stefanie Posavec were living parallel lives as expats in London and Brooklyn when they decided to start a year-long postcard project.

Each week, they sent each other a postcard—but not just any postcards. As artists who work with data, each postcard illustrates a particular type of data about their lives.

After all 52 weeks, the project recently ended. You can see a few of the postcards below, or more on their site.

Life

The Self-Addressed Envelope We Send to Ourselves

"Every day is like a self addressed envelope we post to ourself. Be careful what you post in it.”

I went through a phase as a kid when I collected autographs from baseball players. It was a pretty short phase—I don’t care much for baseball now—but for a few moths, I spent all my allowance on baseball cards, then consulted a book that listed the addresses of retired players. I’d send off a card to five or ten of them a week, including a note asking for an autograph, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope, then wait to see what happened.

As I recall, the results were pretty good. It took a while, but on average about half of the players returned my envelope with an accompanying autograph. It was fun to get mail, and the response motivated me to send out more batches of requests so I could await the returns in future weeks.

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A Box in the Mail Every Once in a While

Have you ever said to yourself, “I wish @chrisguillebeau would send me a box of surprises in the mail?” Of course you have. Is your life incomplete without paper airplane books and whiskey stones? Of course it is. Thanks to advances in technology and a new service in California, you can now solve both of…