PTT, the Dutch Telecom, commissioned RS to create a set of stamps to commemorate the four-yearly Floriade, Holland’s biggest flower show. This coincided with the first time that we had ever used the new Macintosh programme that enables image manipulation, Adobe Photoshop. Luckily, the job came with the benefits of a long preparation time, and over a four-month period we settled down to an intensive exploration of the programme’s capabilities.

All of this was carried out on a Mac IICI with a 40 megabyte hard disc and 8 megabytes of RAM. No storage space was possible except floppy discs, as the Syquest storage system wasn't yet available to us. This meant a torturous process of all-night image processing and endless exchanging of tens of floppy discs. There were also in fact enormous problems at that time in matching the printed colours to the conceptions we had produced on screen.

The original symbols were drawn in FreeHand, turned into Pict files by taking screen-captures, and then imported into Photoshop, processed and colourised. The images were then brought back into FreeHand and the typographic information added.. This sounds very obvious now, but it is an example of how long it takes to break certain habits that come part and parcel with digital design.