Postage stamp design Postage stamp design Postage stamp design is the activity of graphic design as applied to postage stamps. Many thousands of designs have been created since a profile bust of Queen Victoria was adopted for the Penny Black in 1840; some designs have been considered very successful, others less so. A stamp design includes several elements required for it to accomplish its purpose satisfactorily. Most important is the denomination indicating its monetary value, while international agreements require a country name on almost all types of stamps. A graphic design is very nearly universal; in addition to making counterfeits harder to produce
Denomination (postage stamp) existing denominations became worthless. In other cases, changes to the local currency have led to changes in denomination. For instance, when the Ryukyu Islands (at the time a United States protectorate) changed its currency from Yen to Dollars, a number of airmail stamps originally printed with Yen values were overprinted and re-denominated to cents in 1959–1960. During periods of hyperinflation, non-overprinted postage stamps of extraordinary denominations have been issued. As one example, in Hungary, on 15 July 1946 a AP40,000 (Hungarian adópengő) stamp featuring a diesel locomotive was issued. This was the equivalent of 80 quadrillion pengő (P80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) Denomination (postage