Postcrossing Blog

Joel Anderson is an illustrator, designer, and founding owner of Anderson Design Group (ADG). Their 63 National Parks, Coastal Collection, and Legends sets of postcards have captured postcrossers’ imaginations and are a favorite of many.

Joel took some time out from his busy Nashville studio to answer Clarisse (aka Cstar9)'s questions via email. All the art included in this post is the work of the Anderson Design Group.

In exploring your work online, I keep running into several keywords that describe the Anderson Design Group – nostalgia, golden age, wonder, adventure, local pride. Do these resonate? Are there other descriptors you’d use?

These are very good words to describe our style of art. As a student in the 1980s at Ringling School of Art & Design, I was particularly drawn to Golden Age illustrators who created magazine covers, ads, and poster art in the early 20th century, before photography became more widely used. These artists hand-lettered, drew, and painted everything in a romantic, iconic style that glamorized travel, celebrated beauty, and evoked a longing to explore.

The travel poster art of that era was commissioned by railways, cruise lines, automobile makers, and eventually airlines to entice people to buy tickets and go places.

Artwork from that magical era still conjures up a feeling of wonder, awe, and passion. We strive to capture some of that magic in our artwork. Our goal is to pick up where these 20th-century masters left off and continue their legacy for a whole new generation to enjoy.

Tell us about the artists in your design group.

Anderson Design Group is an ever-evolving team of artists who have worked under my direction for 30 years. I was trained to be an illustrator and a graphic designer, so I still enjoy doing some of the artwork myself.

4+ years ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, so I am gradually losing my fine motor skills. This has challenged me to enhance my skills as an Art Director—sort of like a composer/director of a chamber orchestra. I don’t have to play all of the instruments, I just have to have a vision, the skills to communicate it, and virtuoso players to interpret the vision, adding their own talent, experience, style, and skill along the way.

I have 2 in-house artists (Aaron Johnson and Derek Anderson) who work closely with me, day in and day out. I also have a roster of contract artists who I engage because of their particular style or skill. One of my collaborating artists lives in Spain, another in New York.

Others I’ve worked with live in Colorado, Georgia, Seattle, and South Carolina. You can see all of the artist’s names next to each of the 2,500+ designs on our site.

The common thread that ties our diverse styles together is attention to authentic detail and a love for Golden Age-styled artwork. I push my artists to create artwork using techniques, rendering styles, colors, and type styling that was popular from 1900 to 1960. We use computers and modern tools, but I encourage my artists to study art history—especially early 20th-century commercial art—and to emulate the sense of style, passion, and grace of that era.

Every year you donate a portion of your profits to the National Park Foundation. ADG has several collections devoted to parks, and you write frequently about individual parks in your blog. At what point did national parks become a focus for the Anderson Design Group?

Our first series of poster/postcard art was created in 2004 to celebrate our hometown, Nashville, Tennessee. It was the Spirit of Nashville Collection, and it featured our favorite things about Music City. That first series of prints won a bunch of awards and began to establish our reputation for doing poster art about specific destinations.

After we had done 150 posters about Nashville, folks from other American cities asked us if we would celebrate their town in the same classic style. So we did posters depicting major U.S. cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Las Vegas, etc. That spawned our Art & Soul of America series.

As we thought about our favorite American destinations, National Parks ranked high on the list, so we began celebrating several of the National Parks and National Monuments in our classic style.

In 2015, my wife and our 4 kids borrowed an old RV and drove from Tennessee to Utah and Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Petrified Forest. That trip was life-changing for our family. It lit the flame for our National Parks passion, and it inspired me to begin trying to render one poster for each of the 59 parks.

My son Nathan is a writer. He and I had an idea—what if we took all of the poster art and we published a book to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the National Parks Service? (The Centennial would be in 2016.) So we published the book (59 Illustrated National Parks) and it became a best-seller.

We’ve since printed multiple editions of the book, updating each time Congress adds new parks. (Now there are 63 National Parks.) We continue to visit as many National Parks each year as possible. We love hiking, taking photos, and just basking in the wilderness and wonder of our American heritage. The parks belong to all of us, and they are definitely worth celebrating, protecting, and passing along to the next generation.

I’m personally dying to know the origins of the Legends series, which are my favorite of your cards. What is this collection’s story?

After we had depicted all 63 of the National Parks in many different ways, we began doing research to figure out other interesting aspects of the parks that we had not yet celebrated in our artwork. We had a lot of success with our Bigfoot posters, and we soon began to notice that many of the parks were associated with similar myths, legends, and historical indigenous stories about Sasquatch and other more bizarre cryptids. As we did our research, we came across legends like the Moth Man, Lizard Man, Grass Man, the Jackelope, the Wendigo, and other creepy, unexplained, or quirky tall tales.

This was an artist’s dream, since nobody had ever photographed or videotaped one of these mythical creatures (except for Bigfoot?). All we had to do was piece together the various stories and use our imaginations to fill in the blanks. We found at least 38 different National Parks with significant legends. During our research, we became aware of other mythical creatures from around the world like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. These international creatures are featured in our poster art, but not yet in our postcard sets.

Tell us about your studio [which I hope to tour soon!] – what are some of the inspirational elements there?

I like toys. I like collecting quirky objects (my wife calls them junk). And I like making folk art out of found objects. This creative clutter (pictured here) brightens our studio and adds some whimsy to our decor scheme.

You’ve had quite a career. What have been some of the most courageous pivots you have made, and what were the biggest lessons you learned from those?

I am 58 years old now. I started ADG 30 years ago. Back then, we were doing mostly album cover and book cover design work for clients like Universal, Capitol Records, Random House, Harper Collins, etc. That was fun, but my passion was illustration—especially poster art. For the first 10 years, only 10% of our business was illustration, and very little of it was poster-related. Today, our biz is 90% illustration, and of that work, most of it is poster art.

We made the shift by saying NO to good-paying jobs that did not fit our passion, and saying YES to jobs that let us do what we loved most. Our work and reputation just kept improving as we focused more and more on what we loved to do. We diversified from doing mostly work for clients to doing a combination of client work, retail, wholesale, and licensing. We opened a retail space in our building, we built a good online store, and I began licensing our art to companies who use it on calendars, puzzles, fabric, and souvenirs. Mind you, we’re still a small, family-owned biz run by just me, my wife, and our son Nathan. We only have 4 employees besides the 3 family members.

Covid was bad for our retail store (it is no longer open), but it was great for our online store. So the big lesson is that life never goes as planned. Challenges can end up being good, even if they cause headaches at first. I believe The Almighty has a plan for each of us, and hence, a good reason for everything that happens in life. I believe that adversity builds character, faith, ingenuity, and humility—all necessary ingredients in living a purpose-driven, joy-filled life! I’ve had to pivot due to Parkinson’s, too… I am now art directing most of the time and not illustrating as much as before (unless I am going for a squiggly, shaky rendering style)!

What is your relationship to paper broadly, and specifically to postal mail (including postcards)?

I love paper. Poster paper, postcard stock, drawing paper, books—they all inspire me. Computer screens, tablets, and phones lack the warmth, permanence, and heirloom quality of paper products. I still send cards, letters, and postcards. I decorate with framed prints. I love opening the mailbox and pulling out a genuine hand-addressed card or envelope. Who doesn’t?

Who would you say have been your main influencers in design?

Many of the nameless artists of the Works Progress Administration era have greatly influenced my art. Norman Rockwell, NC Wyeth, Kustav Klimt, Roger Broders, Alphonse Mucha, Ludwig Hohlwein, and Tom Purvis are some of my heroes, too. Everything my team creates is inspired in some way by artists who have gone before us. We often mentor art students and give them tours of our studio. Our work is inspiring hundreds of young artists who will eventually follow in our footsteps creating a whole new generation of art. Nothing is new under the sun, yet each new creation nudges art history forward.

What’s something you are most proud of, in your art/design work?

I am very satisfied to know that thousands of people around the world enjoy looking at a poster or postcard designed by Anderson Design Group. I am proud of my artists, my family, and our collaborators who all work together to make accessible, affordable, enjoyable art. And I am so blessed to be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor while I am still alive (unlike so many brilliant struggling artists whose work only became famous or profitable after they died).

What’s next for Anderson Design Group?

We are finishing off our World Travel Collection—a massive poster series that includes at least one poster for every country on the globe. It would make a fabulous 200-piece postcard set, but it would probably cost about $100… so I’m not sure if people would buy it! Maybe we could break it up into smaller collector sets—divided up by continents? But wait—Antarctica would be a pretty small set!

To learn more about Joel and the Anderson Design Group work, check out their website and shop. You can also see this video interview on Joel Anderson’s origins and growth as an artist and business founder, including how to approach failure! And last but not least, you can learn how Anderson Design Group’s Spirit of Nashville series became iconic in Nashville.

And now, for the traditional giveaway you’ve all been waiting for! Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the Anderson Design group to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below sharing your favorite national park from your country. Four winners will be picked and posted here next week.

The World Postcard Day is a little over 2 months away, and we can feel the buzz of excitement starting to grow! Lots of people are eager to get started preparing for the big day (28 special meetups on the calendar already!), and we are too — so let’s talk about this year’s theme and postcard!

The theme for 2024 is “The Timeless Magic of the Post”, in honor of the 150^th anniversary of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Founded in 1874, the UPU has played a crucial role in connecting people across the globe, fostering international cooperation between postal services and creating a unified postal network. They are an important part of what makes it possible for us to seamlessly send our postcards internationally, ensuring that they are delivered by different postal operators without us needing to worry about the intricate processes behind them. They make the magic happen!

We know some of you have been wondering when our postcard design contest will take place. We love running the contest with our judges and seeing all your creativity — it’s been a highlight of the last few years!

However, over recent years it has become harder to run a global design contest. As you may remember from last year, it can be hard to detect copyright issues with the works submitted; even when being especially careful, it’s easy for such things to slip through, as the tools we can use for that only go so far. More importantly though, we have also noticed a growing number of entries where the images were most likely done by artificial intelligence (AI) software. It’s becoming nearly impossible to tell apart AI-generated designs from the ones you pour your hearts into, and this task will only get more difficult going forward… so, after a lot of thinking, we’ve decided to switch things up this year: instead of our usual design contest, we’ve commissioned an awesome designer to create the official World Postcard Day postcard for 2024.

So, celebrating this remarkable milestone from the UPU with the theme “The Timeless Magic of the Post” was the challenge we presented to NY-based illustrator Rose Wong. You might remember Rose from this blog interview earlier this year, from the Flower Box postcard set, or maybe from one of her countless contributions to The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. Rose brought her unique style to the assignment and created a whimsical interpretation of the theme, honoring the UPU legacy by capturing the enduring magic of postcards and mail.

We love this vibrant design, with its whirlwind of happy mail! This is just how we feel as postcrossers — like conductors of a symphony that spreads magic all around the world!

As in previous years, we’re making this postcard design available for free on the World Postcard Day page so that anyone can print it at a local printing shop or through an online service (like Vistaprint or Moo).

And as we always say, any postcard sent on October 1st is a World Postcard Day postcard — so feel free to mail this one or any other postcards you like. It’s all good! If you’re planning to send postcards on the day, we encourage you to share a picture of your cards next to a mailbox on social media, using the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay, as a way to spread the word.

And now, it’s your turn! Let’s plan some get-togethers, visits to museums and workshops, and brainstorm ways to spread some happiness into the world’s mailboxes. How are you planning to celebrate? 71 days to go!

Hurray! It’s our birthday! 🥳 Postcrossing celebrates 19 years of joy and connections today, and we’re marking the date with chocolate cookies… and a surprise!

But before that, a big thank you to all postcrossers for being part of this community and for helping make Postcrossing what it is today. It’s been 19 years of stories from around the world, 19 years of learning and sharing… and about one postcard received every 6 seconds — it feels unbelievable, doesn’t it?

Our gratitude goes also to the team and all the volunteers that make Postcrossing run smoothly — and to all of you who have supported the project financially over the years. We wouldn’t have made it this far without your help.

So we hope you can take a moment today to celebrate this anniversary with a little dance, and maybe a cookie or three! And, of course, with postcards too!

Now, about that surprise…

If you were in Postcrossing over a decade ago, you might remember we used to have a small shop… which didn’t see much action, and ended up closing. In recent years though, more and more people have been asking us where they could get Postcrossing merchandising, and we ourselves have long felt that it would be nice to have a platform for the fun stuff we’ve always wanted to make.

Setting up the logistics of a global shop is not an easy feat, but after we found a partner with sustainable production practices and warehouses on a few different continents, the challenge became much simpler. Once we designed the products for our first collection, it still took us quite a while to work through all the (seemingly endless) bureaucracy, but today we’re finally ready to re-launch it.

So, welcome to the new Postcrossing shop!

We’re super excited about the shop relaunch, and we hope you are too — we can’t wait to see all the Postcrossing merch being worn by real postcrossers!! 😍

Now that the shop is in place, every purchase will help support the project and make room for even more postal awesomeness in the future. We have lots of ideas for cool products we want to make and look forward to working with designers to bring them to life. If you have suggestions of things you’d like to see in the shop (other than postcards), let us know in the comments below!

PS: This is a new adventure for us, as we are new to the whole e-commerce thing. Please be patient with us while we iron out all the kinks. 🙏

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

22nd July is the United Nations’ International Day of Friendship, so what better time for Postcrossing to ask about a topic near to everyone’s heart: friendship!

At the moment my friends from university are scattered all over the UK, but every so often we like to meet up and have a meal. I’m very lucky to live close to the friend I’ve known all my life, though. We were born in the same hospital, went to the same nursery, and then to the same junior school. We’ve been there through thick and thin, and it was her wedding I wrote about on the blog for May’s writing prompt. As you might expect, over the years we haven’t always had the same interests, and we’re almost more like siblings than anything else, so generally we keep our relationship healthy by meeting up often and chatting, rather than shared activities. Lately we’ve been going for walks around a local country park, at Newmillerdam. It’s a lot of fun watching the changes through the year. It’s my turn to buy us ice cream this weekend, too!

Mostly, though, my day-to-day interactions with friends are with online friends who I met through the massively-multiplayer online game, Final Fantasy XIV—I’ve been having incredible fun over the last couple of years meeting up with them in the game and doing things together, like playing hide-and-seek (I’m not very good at it), doing the game’s treasure hunts, and doing “raids” (difficult fights that require a lot of coordination). A large part of the game is made to be experienced with 3–23 other people, so there are lots of opportunities to team up.

Plus I’ve ended up meeting one of them (so far) in person! Over the last year and a half I’ve dragged my new friend “Prof” to several bookshops, a zoo, and a surprise trip to a botanical garden (because he loves plants). Perhaps in July we should start planning our next adventure, in honour of International Day of Friendship! Do you have any special plans to hang out with your friends in July? We’d love to hear about it here, and you can write about it on your postcards if you’re stumped for what to say!

Kiwis are curious birds… native to New Zealand (which is also called Aotearoa in the Māori language), they are nocturnal land birds. They have feathers that look like hair, strong legs and no tail, and they cannot fly. So how would a kiwi deliver your postcards? 🤔 Why, with balloons, of course!

Meet the cute new Postcrossing stamp from New Zealand, coming out this August! Isn’t it brilliant? Plus, this stamp issue includes a really nice maxicard too:

Designed by Sumin Ha for NZ Post, the stamp is being printed in Napier by Brebner Print, using lithography. You cannot see it in these images, but the stamp features an overgloss coating over the kiwi itself, which will make it extra shiny and special… Be still, my little heart! 😍

The stamp will be issued on August 7th, so from that day onwards, local postcrossers will be able to send their postcards out into the world with these cute stamps! It’s possible to pre-order the stamp already on NZ Post’s online shop, and they also deliver internationally for all collectors out there. Those orders will be shipped on the issuing date.

We’re really excited about this and can’t wait to see these kiwis make their way to thousands of mailboxes worldwide!