Stamps - Meccano Concept

Having found in my research into UK firsts that Meccano was a British invention and the first engineering / mechanics based toy in the world - invented by Frank Hornby in 1901 and first sold in 1908 (Lego emerged in 1949). 

To celebrate this fact and Hornby's inventiveness I thought I would be good to employ Karel Marten's colourful monoprinting technique to a set of Meccano stamps. I guess you could say that it is a celebration of Hornby's invention through an homage to Martens print experiments. Nevertheless, I wanted the stamps to be fun and colourful to represent the toy they are trying to convey. 

I started off by making myself some vector pieces of Meccano and set about designing some interesting abstract shapes from them - overlaying them to simulate Marten's print experiments (I couldn't go too over the top with the shapes because they would need to fit on the small scale of the stamps themselves). 

Once I'd finished playing with the digital Mecanno.... I applied the abstract shapes to the large 27mm x 37mm stamp template. Feeling that the plain white background designs looked very flat, I added a desaturated speckled paper background to the stamps to make them more dynamic and reference the manual print process of Martens : 

Happy with the abstract shapes I attempted to represent the product name using the shape of its parts:   

Happy with the name design I placed it onto the series of stamps:

As a set of six as you would find them in a book: 

Alternative head, value and text placement:

I like the later text placement of the name stamps but my problem with the Meccano name stamps is that the shapes and the letters themselves don't lend themselves to overlaying colours and as a result don't appear as fun as the abstract designs - which is surely the whole point of the toy! In my opinion the abstract stamps represent the product best. They're such fun shapes!