Vignette

A vignette is a separate center portion of a stamp design, usually a pictorial element. The rest of the design is the frame.

In many cases, the same vignette design could be used for multiple values and only the frame designs with different denominations needed to be different.

Earlier bicolor stamps even to the mid-20th Century were printed in two separate steps. Unlike the perfect printing that you think you see today, matching the two parts of the design perfectly was not always possible. If you think that the printing presses were run slowly and carefully to achieve perfection, then, if you were doing the job back then, you probably would have been fired for working too slow on your first day.

So, usually (but not always) a vignette design was faded out at the edges with some white space around to allow for imperfect centering. Unless vignette centering is wildly off-center, it is just a variety and not an error. The US Pan-American 1c and 2c values are collected with vignettes being off-center, but with so many printed, they are just minor varieties. Inverted centers are another story.  File:Bel Congo first 10c type.jpg|Belgian Congo 1910 value. Note the vignette is more-or-less designed to miss the ornament at top. It is off-center, shifted to the bottom, but within acceptable limits. File:Bel Congo DIX ty II.jpg|1915 value. The old vignette was used but the frame design was changed, with a large white space at top and the bottom not fitting the new frame, either. File:Bel congo DIX at top.jpg|1915 modified value. A new vignette was created to better fit the new frame. 

See

 * Parts of a stamp

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