Rescue South Africa is the country’s official disaster response team, made up of volunteer emergency response specialists drawn from public and private sector services. The team has worked through a long list of international disasters and has represented South Africa with pride and distinction doing it. This was a stamp issue for them, through the South African Post Office.
The design had to reflect the surfaces the team actually works on: chaotic, broken, unstable. The imagery is taken from photographs of real rescue operations, and the globe on the envelope stands for the range of places they have been called to.
Everything in it is cut and torn paper and corrugated card, and that is not only a technique. Paper tears. A cutout figure is a hole in a sheet rather than a thing drawn on it. Making rescuers out of the most fragile material available is the closest the piece gets to saying what it is about, and it says it without a line of copy.
