Pigeon wins prestigious US Louie Award for Paper Engineering & Innovation

The UK stationery brand Pigeon has won a coveted Louie award in San Francisco, organised by the US Greeting Card Association. A total of 1,229 products were entered this year, across 57 categories, and Pigoen took home the award for Paper Engineering & Innovation. The judges loved the concept, and gave the following quotes:

– ‘An outstanding concept and fun for both the sender and recipient’.

– ‘Genius. Beautifully designed and artfully executed. I would buy this in a heartbeat’

The Louie Awards are a symbol of excellence in the greeting card industry and are highly coveted by publishers and designers alike.

A graphic designer from Birmingham, UK, who fell out of love with social media has invented a brand-new way of
communicating.

Pigeon post is a beautifully designed, paper-based, origami-style letter-and-envelope combined, for the digitally fatigued. Available in a range of gorgeous patterns, Pigeon offers a more satisfying alternative to the always-on, instant-gratification tools that most of us use to communicate with each other every day. ‘Pigeons hark back to a time when the world was slower and kinder,’ says John Morse Brown, who came up with the concept. ‘A time when we waited for news from our friends to drop through our letterboxes instead of being thrust upon us from the moment we open our eyelids.’

Not that John is suggesting that busy people have to write hundreds of words. Pigeon has a deliberately limited window for content, to avoid being too off-putting for a generation unused to the art of letter writing. ‘I sometimes say it’s a bit like Tweeting, but with a pen. And if you want to be proper old-school, Pigeons are even just big enough for you to slip in a Polaroid photo.’

John came up with the idea as a result of a sense of dissatisfaction with Facebook and similar platforms. Like many people, he had jumped unthinkingly on the social media bandwagon – but became increasingly aware of its limitations. ‘I came to realise that most, if not all, of my online interactions were pretty negative. Either I was compulsively checking my posts for “likes”, or I was getting annoyed by people showing off and oversharing. They probably felt the same about me,’ he says. ‘For all that frenetic activity, the platform wasn’t fostering any genuine sense of connection. There was something about it that left me feeling hollow and empty. So I took the plunge and closed my social media accounts. But then a good friend of mine moved to the USA, which meant I needed a new way of keeping in touch. And that made me think about letters.’

John put his skills as a graphic designer with a background in engineering into play, and came up with Pigeon: a letter that folds into its own ready-made envelope, and comes in a whole range of attractive designs. ‘I’ve discovered first-hand the real pleasure in knowing that, in the next day or two, a friend will receive a completely personal note from you, and that you might get a hand-written reply some time after that.

‘It sounds perverse in our day and age, that having to wait can feel good. But it really does. ‘Added to which, I often read letters from friends two or three times over. I can’t say the same for social media. Romantic as it sounds, with a letter you end up with a little part of your friend, to keep for ever. In my view, a letter offers the chance of making a real connection, and that helps sustain true friendship.

‘Now I’m working on passing on my love of letter writing to my children – and to my great surprise they’ve leapt at it. I’m really pleased, because for all the advantages of digital communication, as a society we’re becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of the “always on” culture. ‘Pigeon offers something slower and gentler – and that’s something I want to pass on to the next generation.’

Pigeons are available online for £4.95 plus P&P for a pack of six, and there are six design sets: Pencil Pigeon, Urban Pigeon, Floral Pigeon, Stationery Pigeon, Wood Pigeon, and Playful Pigeon.

For more information on the Pigeon story, see www.pigeonposted.com