Seal your mood!

Happy, angry, laughing out loud, sad, surprised… The emoticons used in chats are now indispensable elements of our online conversations. They are complementing our words and sentences, and sometimes even express us quite well on their own. Many times, we instinctively draw little smiling faces next to the entries in our calendars, and mark the events important to us with distinctive color codes matching our current state of mind. Colors, moods, plants – hand-crafted offline emojis for everyone. Here comes Mood stamp by Judit Káposztás.

Judit, the founder of the ArtiStamp brand has been longing to make colorful stamps that can work well in a bullet journal, as well as in personal planners and calendars.

“In spring, I created a small graphics with stylized female faces and plant motifs, displaying different kinds of emotions. This was a personal work, fun, for the joy of creation, inspired by the pictures of Matisse. When the image was done, I knew instantly that the stamps I’ve been waiting for so long can now be brought to life. This is how Mood stamp was created”– Judit explained.

The stamps are small, with a diameter less than two centimeters, so they look good next to hand writing, and they also give space for their user to exploit their creativity by combining the prints and by using diverse colors. The colors displayed on the handles of the stamps show the colors Judit attributes to the moods expressed by the graphics, but this is not mandatory at all: everyone is free to decide what colors of ink to use, this way also providing an opportunity for self-expression.

In addition to their fantastic functionality, the stamps bear an aesthetic value, too, and may also influence the mood of their owner. One can arrange them on the table, they make their environment more colorful, and they can also be used for “mood tracking” – one can mark their current state of mind with them. (Mood tracking is a positive psychological method for improving mental health. The person applying the method records their mood during a given period of time in order to define the pattern of their mood changes – Ed.)

The Mood stamp already caught the attention of Hogy Vagy Egyesület (How are you Association). The association holds narrative therapy group sessions for children in three kindergartens in District VIII of Budapest, led by psychology undergraduates. Narrative therapy group sessions improve emotional and social skills based on a psychological method that helps children identify and understand their own feelings and behavior and those of others with the help of improving their mentalization skills, so that they can navigate in the different social situations more confidently. Mood stamps further enrich the set of tools of the association. In the first round, they start to integrate the stamps in their groups operating as a social venture launched in Pagony bookstore.

The hand-painted stamp currently showing six moods and four plant motifs can be purchased in Stilshop and LúdLabor, but soon they will also be available for sale in Rododendron Art & Desig Shop, too.

• design