Postcrossing Blog

After months and months of waiting, it’s finally World Postcard Daaaay!! 🥳

Do you feel the excitement in the air too? If you sit still and listen very very closely, you might be able to hear the busy scribblings of thousands of pens gliding across these little pieces of paper… And have you tried licking a stamp today? They somehow taste better than in any other day of the year… it’s like magic!

World Postcard Day is the day we celebrate the joy that postcards bring, by flooding mailboxes all over the world with happy mail. We cannot but smile imagining the puzzled look of postal workers everywhere, when they notice the avalanche of postcards, making its way through their sorting machines!

For those who are just joining the celebrations for the first time this year, we invite you to learn a bit more about the history of postcards. Did you know this is the day in which they celebrate their 152^nd anniversary? Yup! Postcards have been around since 1869, when Dr. Emanuel Herrmann suggested that a practical and cheaper alternative to letters should be implemented for shorter, more efficient communications. His recommendations impressed the Austro-Hungarian Post, who put them to practice on October 1st 1869, resulting in the Correspondenz-Karte… and the rest is history!

Postal operators, museums, philatelic associations, charities, libraries and postcard enthusiasts in different countries have all put together a number of events to celebrate the day, so do make sure to check them out too.

Oh, I forgot to mention this on the last post! The best meal for the World Postcard Day (as suggested by Bonnie Jeanne’s aka postmuse last year) is ravioli, because they look like little postage stamps! So, we challenge you to make or grab some on your way home — it’ll be our shared World Postcard Day tradition, part of the day’s lore.

Wherever you are, however you wish to celebrate, we hope you have a brilliant World Postcard Day… and we’ll see you on your mailbox! 😊

Who’s ready for the biggest day of the year, next Friday? 🙋‍♀️ We’ve ordered some postcards, restocked our stamp supplies, refilled our fountain pens and made a quick list of people we’d like to send postcards to on this special day, so we’re super ready to spend October 1st spreading the joy of happy mail!

Join us in mailing a postcard to a friend or a relative, to someone who needs a bit of cheering up, a thank you postcard to a person who had a positive impact in your life this year or help a little one send their first postcards! These are some of the ways in which you can celebrate the day and spread some mail joy.

You can also send postcards to other postcrossers, and like last year, if you request an address through Postcrossing on World Postcard Day, you’ll get your a special badge on your profile (or a little something extra on your current World Postcard Day badge, if you already have one). Last year, we made things a bit confusing with timezones (they’re so complicated 😱!), so this year we decided to simplify: if you send a postcard during October 1st in the timezone of your account’s location, it’ll be counted for the badge. That should make it easier: just draw addresses during your October 1st, and when one of those postcards arrives, the badge will show up on your profile!

And last but not least, there are a number of events organised around the world to celebrate the day — from exhibitions and seminars, to children activities, special cancellation marks and even some meetings of enthusiastic postcrossers taking place. Check out the Events page for more details and to join an event near you!

Even if there’s nothing happening in your area, you can still join an online event — like this seminar by Barry Stagg (Chairman of the British Thematic Association) on the various ways in which to collect, store and display picture postcards. Or, you can participate via Instagram Live on a postcard-writing event organised by “From Me to You”, a UK charity that will be writing postcards for people in hospitals. We’ll be online too, quietly writing postcards most of the day on Postcrossing’s Discord server voice channel — you’re welcome to join us there, if you’d like.

Let us know in the comments how you’re planning to spend this special day… and let the countdown begin!

Good news, everyone! We have an official postcard for the World Postcard Day 2021, and it’s beautiful! 😍

We received 173 submissions in the contest in the past couple of months, and so it was a really difficult task to pick just three winners among all the designs. Together with Finepaper and Curator Georgina Tomlinson from London’s Postal Museum, we’ve ooh’d and aah’d at all the little details, the colors and different ways that our artists (some of them quite young!) chose to interpret this year’s theme “Across the world on a postcard”. Magic carpet postcard rides, postcards as tickets for a worldwide trip, parents showing children the world through postcards, cute animals writing their cards… there was a bit of everything!

In the end, the juries were enthralled by this design from Taiwanese postcrosser and artist Shao-hua Wu (aka shao_huaaa):

She did a brilliant job of illustrating this year’s theme, and we’ll be delighted to see this gorgeous design making its way to many mailboxes on October 1st! Congratulations Shao-hua! About the design, she wrote:

“Postcard with the exotic scenery delivered to every postcrosser.
Made our mind travel to different places on postcards.
Bring the local daily and special memory to people’s normal day.”

Isn’t that sweet? Our minds do travel to different places when we send or receive postcards, as they are indeed little pieces of special memories brought into our days. 😊 You can see many more of Shao-hua’s illustrations on her Instagram page, and we invite you to also come check out the 2nd and 3rd place winners on the contest page.

If you’d like to print this postcard on your local printing shop or through an online service (like Vistaprint), the files are available for download on the World Postcard Day page. If you use it or receive it, we encourage you to share it online with the hashtag #WorldPostcardDay! We’d love to see how far and wide this postcard travels, and especially look forward to seeing pictures of it next to different mailboxes!

And with just a month and a half to go, it’s time to get our ducks in a row and start preparing for the World Postcard Day in earnest! A few events are already on the calendar, but we look forward to many more popping up in the next few weeks.

Not sure how you can celebrate the day? Check out this page for some tips – for instance, you can bring postcards to a classroom to help little ones learn from them and send some, or help your local library or museum do something special to mark the day. Share your plans with us in the comments below, or on this forum topic, so we can spread the word and cheer you on!

And naturally, the World Postcard Day badge will be awarded once more to those who send at least one postcard in Postcrossing on October 1st (during UTC time). Make sure to save some slots until then, so you can request a few postcards on the day!

PS: Hi everyone! I’m adding a little postscript to this post to make a few things clear.

As Paulo mentioned somewhere in the comments below, the World Postcard Day postcard was chosen by a multi-disciplinary jury based on the artistic interpretation of this year’s theme. We think it’s a lovely postcard which perfectly embodies the spirit of “Across the world on a postcard”.

Design competitions are based on artistic merit of the submitted work — not on the artist’s personal life or their views. Postcrossing and the World Postcard Day do not endorse anyone’s political views with this design, and we do not award or disqualify designs based on them.

We have listened to all arguments presented and understand that this is an important topic to some of our members, but we do not see a valid reason to disqualify this postcard. In the end, the World Postcard Day is a celebration of postcards and the joy that they bring — whether one prints the official postcard or chooses to commemorate with any other postcard, it’s all good!

Postcrossing aims to be a respectful and friendly community, and many of the comments in this blog post were not in that spirit. Because this discussion no longer feels productive, I’m afraid we are closing the comments here. As always, the team can be reached directly via the Contact Form.

Submissions are now open on the World Postcard Day design contest that we’re running together with our friends at Finepaper, and interested designers can upload their designs! So, if you’re artistically inclined, it’s time to come up with ideas that represent this year’s theme “Across the world on a postcard”, and submit them on the contest page. I’m sure postcrossers know better than anyone the feeling of traveling to another place through a postcard… so it should be an easy task to represent this idea trough an image, right? 😇

And let’s talk prizes! Although only one postcard will be the official postcard of this year’s World Postcard Day, the best three designs will all receive prizes:

Each winner will be awarded a bluetooth Wacom drawing tablet, plus some neat Pantone products as well! These Pantone goodies were kindly sponsored by Tecnimprensa (the company that represents Pantone in Portugal), and I’m sure they’ll come in handy.

You have until the end of July 15^th (UTC) to submit your proposals digitally, and the winners will be announced in mid-August, which should then give everyone plenty of time to download and print the official postcard locally, like last year.

Even if you’re not very artistically inclined, make sure to spread the word about the contest to any talented friends. We are super curious about this year’s designs, and can’t wait to see which postcard will be the official World Postcard Day postcard of 2021! 🎉

… and so it starts again! 😊

We’ve been working behind the scenes on this year’s edition of the World Postcard Day, and today we’d like to announce one of the most exciting parts of it: the graphic design competition to find the official postcard of 2021's events! Last year, we tested by running the contest in Portugal only, together with our friends at Finepaper, a neat printing and design company based in Lisbon. This year, and in the global spirit of postcards, we’re extending the competition to the whole world. So no matter whether you’re a student in Bangladesh, an artist in Argentina, or maybe just someone who really likes drawing, crafts or design — you can participate too!

This year’s theme is “Around the world on a postcard”. The ability to transport us to far away places through the image and words is a really nice characteristic of postcards, and we would like to see this facet featured on this year’s official postcard. How you will choose to make that work is up to you — illustration, photography or some sort of mixed design approach are all valid approaches to the topic. The sky is the limit!

Will there be prizes? You mean, besides worldwide recognition and the immense satisfaction of seeing your design traveling all around the world? 🤪 Naturally! They’ll be announced on the World Postcard Day contest page soon, along with the rules and juries of the contest.

Digital design submissions open later this month, but we are giving postcrossers an early heads-up so you can start working on your proposals. Gather your pencils or fire up Photoshop, and tell your friends to participate too! The contest will run for around 2 months, and results will be published on the World Postcard Day page (and here on the blog) sometime after the deadline closes. We are really looking forward to seeing your creative ideas pour in!

And if, like many of us, you don’t have a lot of creative bones in your body, this is a good time to start making plans and think how you’ll celebrate this year’s event. While we’re busy poking post offices and big postal museums, you can get in touch with your local libraries, museums, schools or other organizations and invite them to commemorate this date as well! Share your ideas with others in the comments below or in this forum topic — now’s the time to start creating some buzz and prepare to make October 1^st the best day in the year!