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Canada Post’s psychedelic trucks bring cheer amid pandemic gloom
OTTAWA, March 14, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Andrew Lewis is bringing bright colors to
Canadians to counter their pandemic gloom one parcel at a time — delivered
by postal trucks wrapped in his psychedelic design.
In 28 cities across the country, a fleet of 37 delivery vehicles —
splashed with a big yellow sun and an image of a traditional red, white and
blue Canada Post truck riding a rainbow across a multicolored landscape
emblazoned with the words “Thanks / Merci” — have hit the road to bring
smiles door to door.
“I thought, what’s fun and happy and is going to connect with people,” to
ease the melancholy and despair felt by many over the past year.
“I understood that people had been going bananas isolated at home without
their usual social connections,” Lewis said in an interview with AFP from his
London, Ontario studio.
“From a design standpoint, to convince a corporation like Canada Post to do
this with one of their vehicles — remember this is their brand ambassador —
is a triumph,” he said.
“No postal service in the world has done this in terms of this degree of
playfulness and such a screwy idea.”
The final design was submitted last September and trucks started rolling
out in December. But Lewis himself first spotted one on a local street only
last week.
It was “bright and really different,” he said.
Postal carriers from across Canada have been snapping photographs of the
delivery trucks and sharing them on social media.
Lewis’s own letter carrier, he recounted, banged on his door one recent
morning to say he had seen one and “thought it was fantastic.”
– ‘People need color’ –
The idea was born out of a proposed stamp intended by the postal service
“to express gratitude and appreciation” to its 64,000 workers for dealing
with a massive surge in parcel volumes during the pandemic, according to a
message from chief executive Doug Ettinger to staff.
Since March 2020, said Canada Post spokeswoman Nicole Lecompte, “the sudden
increase in online shopping boosted the volumes going through our network to
the levels we normally observe only during the (Christmas) holiday season.”
More than one million parcels were delivered each day for 181 consecutive
delivery days last year, compared to 67 days leading up to Christmas in 2019,
for example.
“It’s not just the volumes that increased, but also the number of larger
household items, like mini-fridges, patio furniture and barbecues coming
through our network,” Lecompte added.
Canada Post reached out to Lewis — one of the world’s top poster artists –
– to design the stamp. The assignment quickly expanded to include a pin for
employees to wear, and then a gift box for the pin.
“As a joke,” Lewis said, he also submitted a mock-up of a Canada Post
delivery truck painted with his psychedelic design. To his surprise,
executives “went crazy for it,” he said.
For inspiration Lewis had looked back to the bright colors of 7-Up
billboard advertisements from the 1970s, as well as commercial illustrations
by Push Pin Studios, best known for the “I (heart) New York” logo and whose
iconic images have been displayed at the Louvre in Paris.
He had also walked around local neighborhoods after the lifting of a
lockdown and said he was captivated by “a lot of drawings made by children of
hearts and rainbows in peoples’ windows.”
A teacher of color theory at Western University in London, Ontario, in
addition to his award-winning poster work, Lewis noted that trends of grays
in clothing, furnishings and interior designs have shifted to mostly bright
colors going into this spring.
“In terms of interiors right now, (the palettes) are very muted because
people need to have their nerves calmed, but in clothing, colors are starting
to pop and have a bit of fun again,” he said.
“After the year we’ve had, I think people need color right now.”
BSS/AFP/MSY/0858 hrs