Thomas Heatherwick’s card has arrived. Every year Heatherwick sends out an amazing new design and the game is to figure out how the hell he made it.

Now we know it’s Christmas –

This year’s features a stamp stuck to a piece of card (see the reverse view below) that has somehow been cut into an extraordinarily delicate filigree shape, with ribbons flowing away from the stamp as extensions of the perforations. Laser cutting? Interns with scalpels? We’re not sure.

Heatherwick’s Christmas cards always play on the notion of postage, with the stamps integral to the design. His 2004 card, shown here, was a tree decoration made of penny postage stamps individually franked before being stuck together and dipped in resin.

In 2003 he sent out tiny wooden boxes with acrylic lids containing four stamps; pulling a drawstring dangling from the back of the box lifted the stamps to reveal Heatherwick’s Christmas message. The address was written on the box itself – there was no further packaging (we didn’t know Heatherwick back in 2003 so we don’t have one of these to show you).

Last year’s card – which we have safely stored somewhere in the house and will dig out and photograph if we remember – featured an Escher-esque cardboard rosette of baffling complexity decorated with individually franked penny stamps.

More dezeen stuff on Thomas Heatherwick here.