Designers as institutional mediators: multimodal meaning-making in Sri Lankan postage stamps

Postage stamps are concise yet ideologically charged multimodal artefacts that participate in the public communication of national identity, cultural heritage, and collective memory. As state-issued media, they combine image, text, colour, typography, and spatial organisation to convey institutional authority and ideological positioning within everyday culture. This article examines how Sri Lankan postage stamp designers contribute to the construction of institutional meanings in public communication by analysing the communicative practices and multimodal design strategies through which those meanings are encoded. Using a qualitative approach that integrates semi-structured interviews with six designers and Multimodal Discourse Analysis as the main framework, supported by a semiotic reading of 26 stamps discussed by designers during the interviews, the study shows how designers negotiate institutional briefs, cultural expectations, and personal aesthetic judgement to produce compressed multimodal ensembles that stabilise institutional narratives within everyday circulation. By situating stamps as multimodal artefacts within state media, the study foregrounds design authorship as a communicative practice and the role of designers as institutional mediators of public meaning. It contributes to multimodal communication scholarship by extending multimodal analytic methods to small-format, state-issued media and demonstrating how compositional hierarchy, palette, typographic choices, and image–text relations operate as vehicles of ideological work, cultural positioning, and identity construction.