QSL Cards
My dad’s a ham radio operator and I grew up with a lot of ham radio culture. I read books like CQ Ghost Ship and SOS at Midnight. One of the best parts of every summer was going to Field Day and camping over the weekend.
Another great aspect of ham radio culture are the QSL cards. QSL essentially means “message received” and it was common for radio operators to exchange cards after contacting each other over the radio. As a kid, it was always the cards from the farthest away that were the most interesting.
I recently found a small online store in Ukraine that sells old cards and had to buy a bunch. I have a vague idea of using them as collage elements, but for now I’m just sitting with them.
This collection is somewhat obviously eastern European-centric (coming from Ukraine) but just in these pictures are cards from Scotland, Lithuania, Russia, India, Latvia, Belarus, Argentina, Holland, Romania, Bulgaria, Japan, Australia, the US, and Cyprus. The cards are from the early 70s to the early 90s, so many come from countries that no longer exist in the shape they did at the time.
I want to be conscious about talking about larger political issues and history that I don’t fully understand, but one thing I see in these cards is just a bunch of people who are nerds (in the absolute best sense of the word) about something and wanting to talk about it. And share their enthusiasm. And connect to each other. It’s pretty great.
And then, of course, I can’t get enough of the design & typography. You see national pride, personal flair, pure information, everything. Any one of these cards is interesting but looking at the collection (I have around 40 or 50 so far) you see such a variety of solutions. It’s real-world design and type. It’s great.