Commentary: Curse of the tilted stamp

When it comes to stamps, like architecture or fashion, no design can please everyone. Stamp collectors are as opinionated when viewing a stamp as food critics are at a restaurant, and rare is the collector with no philatelic pet peeves. For some, it's when the design is too bland and lacks color; for others, it's when the design is too vibrant and colorful. The design can be too sparse or too dense, too conventional or too sophisticated, too derivative or too bold. When a new stamp is issued, collectors line up on opposing sides and either lavish it with praise or heap their scorn on it, largely in reaction to the design. Even a subject as harmless as solar energy can polarize audiences on account of how the designer chose to manifest it visually.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the stamp above is not the result of a printing error. It represents a deliberate attempt on the part of the designer -- in this case, Osnat Eshel -- to require viewers to either tilt their head twenty degrees clockwise in order to comfortably view the image or, alternatively, rotate the stamp twenty degrees counterclockwise. As a stylistic device, the tilted stamp invites questions: What effect do tilters like Eshel seek to achieve by using the technique? Which designers have been most partial to its application in their stamps? At what point did tilting start to become popular with Israeli stamp designers? Is there a relation between the tilted stamp design and the shaky-cam technique common among some filmmakers?

בול שבעים שנה לאקדמיה בצלאל
"70th Anniversary of Bezalel" stamp
Israel Post (1976)
Design: Aryeh Hecht
Tilt: 10°

The first time tilting was applied to an Israeli stamp, albeit still on a limited scale, was in 1976. On the occasion of Bezalel Academy's seventieth anniversary, Aryeh Hecht (אריה הכט) designed a stamp that featured a stylized three-dimensional key whose notches were cut in the shapes of a cube, a cylinder and a triangular prism. These shapes -- carved out of the key, as it were -- were rendered three-dimensionally on the tab below the stamp proper. Both the shapes and the key underwent tilting to the tune of just over ten degrees.

What effect was Hecht endeavoring to achieve by tilting the images on his stamp? A clue is provided in a 2017 article by Kevin R. Brooks of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia:

The simulation of depth in artistic works presented on flat media has been a challenge for artists throughout history. Although the objects to be represented are invariably voluminous and are located at various distances, their representations on walls, paper, or canvas are necessarily two dimensional. Historically, artists throughout the world have attempted to imply depth using techniques that exploit the well-known "pictorial" cues to depth.¹

One of the pictorial cues Brooks references is occlusion, a technique whereby distant surfaces are occluded by overlapping nearer surfaces. By tilting the images on the XY-plane, as well as shading them appropriately, Hecht successfully created an illusion that the key and shapes had depth and volume. In so doing, Hecht was able to capture the spirit of Bezalel, where he was a fourth-year student at the time, as an innovation-leading school of art and design. Hecht's application of tilting was in good taste: it dovetailed elegantly with the design's central motif, served a clear purpose, and enhanced the overall appeal of the stamp.

בול שנת הנוער הבין־לאומית
"International Youth Year" stamp
Israel Post (1985)
Design: Naomi & Meir Eshel
Tilt: 20°

Nine years passed before tilting made its second appearance on an Israeli stamp. In 1985 Israel Post joined the postal administrations of numerous countries around the world in issuing a stamp celebrating International Youth Year, a 1985 event adopted as an official resolution by the United Nations General Assembly. Designed by Naomi and Meir Eshel (נעמי ומאיר אשל), Israel's "International Youth Year" stamp featured three medals hanging from ribbons representing peace, happiness and love; below the medals were three lines of text in Hebrew and English referencing the occasion on which the stamp was issued. The text, represented as cursive handwriting, was tilted by twenty degrees.

Why the Eshels -- at the time they were still a married couple -- chose the motifs of a peace sign, a smiley face and a heart is clear. As universal symbols, these are motifs that transcend language and are understood by kids from a young age. The reason for the cursive handwriting is also self-evident: it was meant to evoke the somewhat sloppy penmanship of an older child or young adult. Conceivably, a related reason dictated the text's twenty-degree tilt. When children are taught to write, they are instructed to experiment with different alignment angles of page to body. Even though the languages are written in opposite directions, the rules for Hebrew and English are identical; to wit, righties are advised to tilt the page counterclockwise and lefties clockwise. Was tilting the text a successful stylistic device? Yes and no. While it lent the stamp a more youthful and handmade look, its clash with the design's rectilinear flow undermined the stamp's compositional unity.

בול יובל נמל התעופה בן־גוריון
"50th Anniversary of Ben-Gurion Airport" stamp
Israel Post (1986)
Design: Moshe Pereg
Tilt: 30°

Since 1979, Israeli postage stamps have featured five elements of text: "Israel," the face value, a descriptive caption, the designer's name, and the year of issue. In 1986 a stamp was issued that tilted the first three of these. Designed by Moshe Pereg (משה פרג), the man behind the symbol for the Israeli new shekel (₪), "50th Anniversary of Ben-Gurion Airport" featured a scene of Ben-Gurion Airport as though viewed through the windows of a passenger jet, with a trail of colored stripes streaking up from the surface and disappearing into the sky like a plane taking off. Below the windows were a caption, the face value and "Israel." They and the streaking rainbow were tilted by thirty degrees.

What makes "Ben-Gurion" a visually compelling stamp is first and foremost its play on perspective: the illusion of viewing the airport as though seated on a plane takes effect immediately. Rather than being a static scene, the streaking colors animate the background view of the airport by suggesting motion and speed. That suggestion is augmented by the text beneath the windows, because it and the streaking colors are tilted by the same angle and because the colored stripes embedded in the text, which are also tilted, follow a sequence similar to the stripes seen through the windows. Pereg's application of tilting was purposeful and clever. It served a clear function within the design, imbued it with character, and made the stamp memorable.

בול אנה פרנק
"Anne Frank" stamp
Israel Post (1988)
Design: Ad van Ooijen
Tilt: 25°

In 1988 Israel became the third country, after Germany and the Netherlands, to issue a stamp in tribute to Anne Frank. Designed by Ad van Ooijen (or Adth Vanooijen; אד ואן אויין), a Dutchman who was living in Israel at the time, the stamp featured four images of Anne Frank as a young girl and an image of the building where she and her family lived in Amsterdam. The illustrations' colors were muted and their lines blurred, giving the images collectively a soft quality as though being viewed through a rainy window or seen in a dream. Conspicuously out of place against this background was the stamp's face value -- printed in large, bold yellow characters, defined by clear, sharp edges, and tilted to the tune of twenty-five degrees.

What should have been a minor detail, the face value on "Anne Frank" was elevated to a level of graphic prominence equal to, if not surpassing, the prominence of the stamp's other details. Part of the reason stemmed from the face value's size and color, but an even larger part was due to its tilt. "Anne Frank" has a decidedly vertical nature: the four faces, as well as the five letters of "Israel" in Hebrew, are stacked one on top of the other; the building between them is tall and narrow; and a white right-side margin spans the height of the stamp. Rather than settle into the design's vertical orientation, the tilted face value disrupted it, and in so doing disrupted the solemnity of the stamp. Considered in isolation from van Ooijen's other stamp designs, the tilted face value is a puzzling feature. However, it is one for which he demonstrated a penchant repeatedly in his work.

גליונית ברווזי ארץ ישראל
"Ducks in the Holy Land" minisheet
Israel Post (1989)
Design: Ad van Ooijen
Tilt: 10°

The next instance of tilting, and the most dramatic up to that point, occurred on a souvenir minisheet issued in 1989. Designed by Ad van Ooijen, "Ducks in the Holy Land" consisted of four stamps, each featuring a different image of a duck, against a background of duck footprints in the sand. The ducks were in rectilinear alignment relative to the perforation; but the perforation, ergo the stamps, was on a ten-degree tilt relative to the minisheet. Strictly speaking, "Ducks" may not qualify as an example of tilting, given that the stamps themselves, when separated from the minisheet, are oriented just like ordinary stamps; but we don't treat a strawberry like a vegetable just because it grows like one, and minisheets, even if they're more likely to end up in an album than on an envelope, are still conventionally classified as stamps. The "Ducks" minisheet was commissioned by Israel Post on the occasion of the 1989 World Stamp Expo in Washington, D.C.

Thanks to a 2019 article in the official magazine of the Israel Tour Guides Association by Jacob Vidas, a senior executive at Israel Post's philatelic service, the public was recently treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of the creative process that culminated in the "Ducks" minisheet. For example, as revealed in the article, the reason ducks were chosen for the 1989 event was because of a misunderstanding involving the annual U.S. Federal Duck Stamp contest that led Israel Post to believe American stamp collectors were enamored with stamps featuring ducks.² As for the tilted design, Vidas suggested that the diagonal perforation was introduced for no other reason than to generate interest in the minisheet and capture the attention of collectors at the stamp expo. While the minisheet proved a resounding success and even came away from the expo with an award, the tilting to which at least some of that success was owed was, according to Vidas, arbitrary in nature, with no intrinsic relation to the stamps themselves. In other words, it was conceived as a gimmick, as a means of deviating from the norm for the sake of deviating from the norm.

בול מאה שנה לעיתונות ילדים עברית
"100 Years of Hebrew Magazines for Children" stamp
Israel Post (1993)
Design: Ad van Ooijen
Tilt: 5°

The 1990s brought a veritable flood of stamps with tilted design motifs, including the second stamp to feature tilted cursive handwriting (Ana Popescu and Miri Gross, 1990; אנה פופסקו, מירי גרוס) and a series of four architecture-themed stamps with their face values tilted (Ad van Ooijen, 1990-1992). They also ushered in the first standalone stamp to go literally full tilt. Designed by Ad van Ooijen, "100 Years of Hebrew Magazines for Children" was issued in 1993 and featured the front page of Olam Katan, considered the first magazine published for kids in Hebrew. Unlike 1976's "Bezalel" stamp, where the image was tilted but not the text, and unlike 1986's "Ben-Gurion Airport" stamp, where the text was tilted but not the image, in "Hebrew Magazines" everything was tilted. The angle of rotation was five degrees.

As with photos of recently deceased statesmen, historic manuscripts limit the creative license a stamp designer has, because the expectation is that the designer's representation will preserve the manuscript or photo in its original form. At the same time, the designer's stamp proposal needs to beat out the competition, and a key parameter evaluated by philatelic committee judges is originality. Tilting was Ad van Ooijen's method of balancing between preservation and innovation. In "Hebrew Magazines," van Ooijen remained faithful to the front page of Olam Katan in its original form at the same time that he left his unique imprint on the design by tilting the page. The question is not why van Ooijen tilted the image of the magazine but why he tilted everything else along with it. Had he tilted only the magazine, it would have been an elegant way of distinguishing it from the surrounding elements in the design. Tilting everything, however, contravened that effect by implying a single layer of information, in turn resulting in needless ambiguity.

בול שבעים וחמש שנה לתרבות
"75 Years of Tarbut" stamp
Israel Post (1994)
Design: Moshe Pereg
Tilt: 30°

In 1994 Israel Post issued a stamp commemorating roughly 75 years since the establishment of the Tarbut Jewish education and culture movement in Eastern Europe. As a distinctly nationalist movement, one of Tarbut's central aims was to instill in young Jews a command of the Hebrew language that would rival the ubiquity of Yiddish and promote a national identity in which Hebrew was an essential component. Designed by Moshe Pereg, "Tarbut" featured photographs from schools in Białystok, Vilnius and Rivne -- major Jewish cultural centers before the Holocaust. The photos were in a faded brownish gray color. Plastered across the right side of the stamp in vastly oversized, color-gradated characters was the number 75. It was tilted by thirty degrees.

In an interview with Yuval Saar of Haaretz in 2011, Pereg -- whose portfolio also includes coins, banknotes and commercial logos -- shared some of the philosophy underlying his approach to design. In his view, there are no accidents in the design process. Every detail has a purpose, down to the choice of one subtle color variation over another. Furthermore, if the viewer is not moved by the design or is left confused by it, the fault lies not with him but with the designer -- same as if a pianist were playing out of tune at a concert.³ While these standards were upheld in the case of Pereg's 1986 "Ben-Gurion Airport," where discrete design elements combined harmoniously to produce a symphonic visual experience, the same standards were clearly not upheld in the case of "Tarbut." The tilted "75" obscured the images beneath it and, being the largest and most colorful element of the stamp, claimed all of the attention for itself. It was the out-of-tune piano drowning out all the other instruments in the orchestra.

גליונית ירושלים 2001 תערוכת בולים בין־לאומית
"Jerusalem 2001 Multinational Stamp Exhibition" minisheet
Israel Post (2001)
Design: Igal Gabay
Tilt: 5°

On the occasion of a stamp exhibition held in Jerusalem in March 2001, Israel Post issued a single-stamp souvenir minisheet capturing the spirit of the exhibition as a turn-of-the-millennium event in a city that is both ancient and modern. According to the minisheet's release notes, Jerusalem 2001 hosted philatelic competitors from Italy, Argentina, Germany, and Spain; and its focuses were Judaica, the Holy Land, and Jerusalem as a nexus of world religions. The souvenir minisheet was designed by Igal Gabay (יגאל גבאי) and featured decorated ceramic wall tiles by Ze'ev Raban from 1925, as photographed by Tsvika Zelikovich. The tiles combined to form a view of Jerusalem's Old City and the words in Hebrew, "Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin daughter of Zion," a variation on a passage from the Book of Jeremiah. The tiles were tilted by five degrees.

"Jerusalem 2001," its image and perforation tilted relative to the minisheet edges but not relative to each other, took a page directly out of van Ooijen's book a-la 1989's "Ducks." Gabay, however, escalated the application of tilting a level higher, rotating additional motifs surrounding the stamp proper by varying degrees and in different directions: the year and name of the designer were tilted 10° from the vertical counterclockwise; a dotted "2001" was tilted 15° from the vertical clockwise; a column of white dots was tilted 5° from the vertical counterclockwise; a Morse code sequence was tilted 5° from the horizontal clockwise, matching the tilt of the perforation and tiles; and a row of gray dots was tilted 5° from the horizontal counterclockwise. Everything else was aligned horizontally. Now, if all the foregoing numbers and directions sound confusing, that's because "Jerusalem 2001" is a visually confusing minisheet. Had Gabay merely tilted the tiles, the result would have been a more coherent design, but there'd have been no novelty in it -- it would set no precedent, because van Ooijen had already done it. By tilting at various angles, Gabay succeeding in making his minisheet unique but in the process also fell into the trap of overdesigning.

פובליציסטים: משה בילינסון
Political Journalists: "Moshe Beilinson" stamp
Israel Post (2002)
Design: Igal Gabay
Tilt: 5°

Political Journalists was a set of four stamps issued by Israel Post in 2002. Designed by Igal Gabay, it paid tribute to the legacies of four prominent ideological columnists and editors-in-chief who profoundly impacted the development of journalism in Israel. Each stamp in the set featured a portrait rendered in the style of halftone printing, i.e. composed of equidistant varisized dots, and corresponded to a particular color. Beneath and to the right of each portrait was a frame. The bottom frame was the same color as the dots, but solid and therefore ostensibly darker; the frame on the right was solid yellow. All the frames in the set were tilted by five degrees.

Like his "Jerusalem 2001," Igal Gabay's "Moshe Beilinson" is a disorienting stamp -- not initially, but it becomes more disorienting the longer one looks at it. In a 2009 interview with Galit Hatan of Globes, Gabay equated his approach to stamp design with his approach to designing advertising posters. "They both come from the same mode of thought," he explained. "The same laws apply to a good poster and to a good stamp -- because in both cases the watch time is very fast (especially in the case of a road sign). People look at both from relatively far away, and everything needs to be understood immediately, the message needs to be sharp and clear. That is why I like clean stamps."⁴ Gabay's characterization of Israeli stamps as being graphically and functionally similar to advertisements is largely correct. Political Journalists demonstrates this reality: it is a set best appreciated superficially, as one would a promotional flyer. Once the eyes settle on the portrait, the design's internal inconsistencies begin making themselves felt -- first the oblique face value, tilted clockwise, then the title at top, tilted counterclockwise, and then all the rest. The face value and title start to resemble angry eyebrows on account of their proximity to the eyes, and the other tilted elements appear haphazardly spun like they were debris floating in water. Had the frame and other elements not been tilted, Political Journalists would have been less striking visually but more sound esthetically. In the case of one stamp in the set, "Rabbi Binyamin," the opposite rotational directions led to the caption in the tab overlapping the newspaper logo, making for an even sloppier design.

בול 50 שנה לתעשייה האווירית
"Israel Aircraft Industries — 50 Years" stamp
Israel Post (2003)
Design: Gad Almaliah, Aharon Shevo
Tilt: 15-20°

For a country as small and resource-strapped as Israel, technology has always played an outsized role -- not only in guaranteeing Israel's military advantage regionally but in supplying its economy with foreign capital from exports. At the forefront of Israel's aerospace defense tech industry is Israel Aircraft Industries, which reported record sales surpassing $4 billion for 2019.⁵ With rare exceptions, Israel Post does not platform commercial entities; but given IAI's status as a state-owned enterprise and its unique contribution to Israel's security over five decades, an exception was made in 2003. Designed by Gad Almaliah and Aharon Shevo (גד אלמליח, אהרן שבו), "Israel Aircraft Industries — 50 Years" featured a model of an airplane atop a printed circuit board with an Arrow missile being launched from the tab. The title was tilted twenty degrees clockwise from the vertical while the face value and caption in the tab were tilted fifteen degrees clockwise from the horizontal.

Like "Ben-Gurion Airport," another stamp that featured flight as a theme and tilting as a motif, "Israel Aircraft Industries" utilized tilting to convey an abstract idea. What idea? The idea of signals being transmitted along a circuit board's traces as a metaphor for speed, precision and efficiency. Making the effect more pronounced were the blue ribbons over which the text was made to appear sliding. Between the roaring and soaring Arrow missile splitting its background like a zipper being pulled open, the tilted text appearing to slide across the circuit board, and the circuit board that was itself tilted, "Israel Aircraft Industries" was a stamp teeming with fast-paced motion. Would the illustration have had the same effect were the design rectilinear and flat? Clearly it would not. The text would have looked like little more than a frame, the different design elements would have lacked integration, and the stamp would have felt static. Moreover, rather than being the stamp's defining feature, the tilting technique was woven into the design naturally, originally, and with finesse.

גליונית התקווה
"Hatikva" minisheet
Israel Post (2008)
Design: Baruch Naeh
Tilt: 55-60°

Opinions expressed in this report are the author's own and do not reflect the views of the stamp collecting community generally. Case in point: "Hatikva," a minisheet issued by Israel Post in 2008 on the occasion of Israel's sixtieth year of independence. Designed by Baruch Naeh (ברוך נאה) and featuring a blue-and-white stamp perforated in the shape of a Star of David, "Hatikva" was voted 2008's most beautiful stamp.⁵ How deserving was it of that honor? Less so than at least three or four other stamps issued the same year. The main feature of "Hatikva" -- tiqwa is Hebrew for "hope," and "Hatikva" is the name of Israel's national anthem -- was the large, bright, intricately patterned star stamp. The text inside the star was tilted by sixty degrees while the national anthem beside it was tilted by fifty-five.

If the foregoing analysis has established anything with certainty, it is this: Tilting is an attention magnet. A designer who wishes a feature of his illustration to stand out has only to rotate that feature by some amount, and voila -- effect achieved. There are, however, other ways to capture attention, and one of them is to turn up the visual volume, to dazzle with size, color, density, and shape. Baruch Naeh, who has designed logos for dozens of Israeli companies, including Israel Post and El Al, has been in the business of capturing the attention of consumers for close to forty years, and "Hatikva" showcased a range of techniques Naeh brought to bear in this regard. Its logo-evoking imagery both celebrated Israel's stellar rise as a corporate brand and promoted Israel's sixtieth year of independence as an extravagant birthday bash. Bright lights and confetti aside, what was the message of "Hatikva"? The irony is that a minisheet purporting to represent the Jewish nation's hope of 2,000 years distilled that hope into a large flashy logo. Rather than being front and center, the national anthem -- the actual hope and the minisheet's namesake -- had its visibility reduced owing to its excessive tilt, dull gray color and peripheral position close to and slanting toward the corner. Having been relegated to the background, the anthem was on the outside of the party looking in. Making matters worse, there was an intent to trace the outline of the star with the lines of the anthem but a misaligned line six messed up the pattern. And speaking of misalignment, it seems odd that the "Hatikva" inside the star (60°) and the anthem outside it (55°) were out of alignment with each other by five degrees. Finally, it is not clear why the star's text was tilted in the first place, given that the stamp on the official first day cover was affixed with its text aligned horizontally.

בול בית"ר ברית הנוער העברי
"Betar — World Zionist Youth Movement" stamp
Israel Post (2013)
Design: Osnat Eshel
Tilt: 20°

In a philatelically ideal world, every new stamp issue would be a major media event, attended by representatives of the press, the government, the postal authority, the local philatelic community, and any groups associated with the stamp's topic. In reality, not only is it rare for new stamps to garner mainstream media attention; aside from a handful of countries, information about new stamps is either minimal and hard to find or altogether nonexistent. An exception to this rule was the "Betar — World Zionist Youth Movement" stamp, issued by Israel Post in 2013. Shortly after the stamp entered circulation, an unveiling ceremony was hosted by Israel's prime minister and the minister of communications, with guests including the CEOs of Israel's Postal Company, the World Betar Movement and the Jabotinsky Institute, the director of Israel's philatelic service, and members of Betar.⁶ Designed by Osnat Eshel (אסנת אשל), "Betar" featured Avraham Melnikov's "Roaring Lion" colored gold, three youths wearing blue shirts, and the flag of Israel -- all of which, along with the face value and other details, were tilted by twenty degrees.

For those at the unveiling ceremony who hadn't yet seen "Betar," their first encounter with the stamp must have been an awkward experience. Were the stamp a picture hanging on a wall, their instinct might have been to walk over and nudge it counterclockwise until it was hanging straight. What was it about the message of "Betar" -- which, given the publicity around it, was clearly an important stamp -- that necessitated such a profound departure from esthetic norms? One possibility is nothing: there was no implied deeper meaning and the tilt was purely arbitrary. In that case, substance was tossed overboard for the sake of style but the boat sank anyway and both were lost. Alternatively, there was a deeper meaning and the onus is on philatelists to coax it out. The scene represented in the stamp -- the uniformed youths arranged sequentially by height like soldiers, the flag's stripes seeming to extend long past the stamp's perforation, the lower tip of the flag's star fitting neatly into the hair of the middle girl, and the golden lion roaring up at the sky and the flag like a wolf howling at a full moon -- is loaded with gravitas. The quality embodied by the scene could also be described as hadar, Hebrew for "splendor," "grandeur" or "glory" and a core value in the Betar creed.⁷ Heads of state are often photographed posing with their chins raised and their eyes gazing off to the distance to make them look heroic and visionary. Whether deliberate or not, tilting the design conferred that same effect on the scene as a whole. A second potential interpretation involves considering that Betar, which was founded in 1923, is today perceived more as a symbol than an active movement. Whereas a horizontally flat design would have appeared static and frozen, tilting it clockwise evoked progress and growth. With no way of knowing for sure what the impetus was for tilting the design, logic suggests that the last two proposals, even if offered in a benefit-of-the-doubt spirit, are a side effect of overanalysis and that the simpler, i.e. meaningless, interpretation be favored.

סופרים ומשוררים ישראלים: עמוס עוז
Israeli Authors and Poets: "Amos Oz" stamp
Israel Post (2020)
Design: Osnat Eshel
Tilt: 15°

After Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, Amos Oz has long been Israel's best-known writer. Oz's death in December 2018, which followed on the heels of two other recent literary losses, prompted Israel Post to issue a three-stamp set in June of 2020. Designed by Osnat Eshel, Israeli Authors and Poets featured stylized portraits of Haim Gouri (1923-2018), Ronit Matalon (1959-2017) and Amos Oz (1939-2018). Beside each portrait were a caption and a short quote, which were tilted fifteen degrees counterclockwise. In the case of "Amos Oz," an image in the tab was tilted by fifteen degrees; for the set's other two stamps, the tilt was twenty degrees.

The quote in the stamp proper does not feel excessively tilted, and it may be that the fifteen-degree angle made it easier to fit the words into the image without it looking cluttered. There's an argument to be made that the caption should have remained horizontal, seeing as it was the quote that the design sought to highlight by way of size, color, the quotation marks, and the bookmark icon -- but that was not what sabotaged the stamps' appeal. What ultimately did that were the tabs, specifically the tilted images in them. When there is no conceivable reason for an image to be tilted -- and, unlike "Betar," in this case there wasn't -- the observer is left to conclude that the tilt is pointless. A design feature that is both prominent and pointless is a design feature that is in poor taste. Add to that the color filters applied to the images in the tab and the glaring use of stock photos, e.g. grain stalks in "Amos Oz," and the flavors Authors and Poets leaves in the mouth are cheap, amateurish and lazy.

Conclusion
Tilt: 10°

Viktor Shklovsky understood that art is fundamentally a process of defamiliarization, of representing an object in such a way as to make the viewer feel he is seeing it for the first time or discovering a meaningful aspect of it he never appreciated before. In as much as stamp design qualifies as art -- there are valid arguments against overlapping the two -- the examples above reflect two divergent approaches to stamp design. In the first approach, tilting is applied in a Shklovskian vein: the image is manipulated as a means of defamiliarizing a quality internal to the image. "Bezalel," "Ben-Gurion Airport" and "Israel Aircraft Industries" are examples of this approach. In the second, tilting is applied in a graphic design vein: the image is manipulated as a means of highlighting a quality external to the image, namely the stamp itself.

In many ways tilting is to stamp design what shaky-cam is to filmmaking. Both manipulate the viewer's perception of reality; they are an artificial special effect imposed from without rather than an aspect developed from within; and rather than being a commentary on the nature of reality, they crucially obfuscate reality. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in Salon, had this to say about the adoption of the shaky-cam technique by up-and-coming film directors:

The filmmakers' unspoken (in some cases probably unconscious) agenda is to deny the audience a fixed vantage point on anything, for any reason, ever -- not just to jack up their adrenaline level, but perhaps to cover weak storytelling, acting, writing or special effects with visual clutter and [wasted] motion. It's the style that directors embrace when they have no style -- a substitute for vision.⁸

Replace Seitz's terminology from the realm of cinematography with its equivalent in the realm of stamp design, and his rant against shaky-cam applies with equal force to tilted stamps. In denying the viewer of the tilted stamp a fixed vantage point, tilting has a disorienting effect similar to the effect shaky-cam has on movie audiences. And as in the case of shaky-cam, more often than not tilting is a cover for laziness, inexperience, underdeveloped skills, and a weak imagination.

That tilting has established itself to the extent that it has among stamp designers in Israel confirms a trend suggested by visiting the galleries of modern art dealers around the country. Once the province of gifted, dedicated craftsmen, today these galleries represent the output of savvy software users and sophisticated 3D printers. Rather than emphasizing subtlety, detail, depth, intention, and novelty, the emphasis has shifted to being catchy, loud, obvious, shallow, and fun. None of this is to imply that all or even most Israeli stamps fall into the second category but that tilting, despite tending to push them in that direction, is a ditch Israeli stamp designers continue carelessly stumbling into and a curse that continues to haunt the stamps they design.

Note: Extensive use was made of Ginifab.com's Online Protractor in the preparation of this report.