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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Get this idea out of your head. A stamp is not a tiny painting.

Somebody might be able to do a great painting 20 by 30 inches.

But you take that down to 1 inch by 1.5 inches.

And it's a challenge to make it work.

And Ethel Kessler is just one of a handful of people who take on that challenge.

I'm Ethel Kessler. Ethel is one of just five art directors responsible for churning out every single stamp issued by the United States Postal Service each year.

And I've been doing that for 15 years.

Those bonsai stamps that just came out with the tiny little beautiful meticulous detailed drawings of trees, those are hers.

And our reporter there is Postal Service in Stamp Enthusiast, Julie Shapiro.

Most people think of stamps and then picture flags or the Liberty Bell or the word love spelled in a cutesy font.

But there are so many other stamps made every year. What about those abstract expression to stamps that were all sorts of awkward sizes?

Or the muppets that were out in a white background and seemed to be bursting out of the envelopes?

And those new pine ears of industrial design stamps?

Oh my goodness.

And I loved the cloud stamps. If you looked at the sheet, they're laid out in the exact same layers they exist in the sky.

Every year there are artful stamps, there are poetic stamps, there are stamps with senses of humor, even surprising stamps.

Just that you don't really see those ones, you just see the flags, the bells and the love.

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