JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's the postage stamp that packs a punch. The greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali, lived his life in the boxing ring, was a civil rights activist, and now Ali's American legacy will be forever celebrated with two U.S. postage stamps. Those stamps will be released tomorrow, and the designer of these functional pieces of art is U.S. Postal Service art director Antonio Alcalá. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ANTONIO ALCALÁ: Thank you.
SUMMERS: Can you just start out by painting a picture? Describe these two stamps for us.
ALCALÁ: Well, the two stamps feature a portrait. It's a publicity still of Muhammad Ali looking directly at the viewer, holding his hands up with boxing gloves on, looking with a direct gaze in that traditional boxer pose. And it's juxtaposed with very large type of his name, Ali. And inside the I's of the - the letter I of Ali is the word the greatest.
SUMMERS: I mean, there are so many images of Muhammad Ali. Of the countless photos you could have chosen, what did you hope to evoke with this sort of classical boxing poster photo that you picked?
ALCALÁ: Yes. Well, so that's always the challenge when doing a postage stamp. You're going to pick an image that is hopefully iconic and representative of sort of this figure at the peak of their performance, at the height. And so this was Muhammad Ali in 1974, sort of at the zenith of his career. Additionally, you know, Muhammad Ali was quite the entertainer. And so a lot of photos of him where he is making direct eye contact, he's sort of playing to the camera. He can be making faces or a joke or being playful with somebody who's next to him. So there aren't that many images of him that I could find where he's making that direct eye contact, but that it's also communicating him as a boxer, which was really how he came to be known.
SUMMERS: I want to just sort of zoom out, big picture, here for a second. I am so curious. As an art director, what is at the top of your checklist as you consider how to honor Americans on these postage stamps?
ALCALÁ: You know, we work with a research group, and so if there are holes in my own personal knowledge about the subject matter, they will provide me with additional information - books, websites, etc. - to do reading and research on. But then it - somehow you try and find an image or a period that'll speak to the public as to why this figure is particularly significant. It's always starting big and then slowly narrowing it down until you find the one piece you think will work best.
SUMMERS: The other thing that I find so interesting - right? - when you think about these stamps is the fact that we're talking about relatively small real estate to accomplish something so creative and meaningful. How do artists and art directors like yourselves manage to capture the illustration of people, landscapes and animals with such great detail and then shrink them down so that they will fit on a postage stamp?
ALCALÁ: As art directors, are (ph) continually reminding our artists to look at your artwork down at stamp size or print it out and look at it at actual stamp size. And when you do that, you discover that either there's a lot of detail that becomes lost or elements that you thought were very clear at full size, become sort of hidden and missing. So it's a learning process. It's a real challenge. I came to stamp design sort of later in my career, and it was a real learning curve for me to figure out how to adjust to that constraint of the smaller format.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Antonio Alcalá, art director for the U.S. Postal Service and designer of the new stamp featuring Muhammad Ali. Thank you so much.
ALCALÁ: Thank you.
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