IN terms of climate, the sheikhdom of Umm al Qiwain is about as far from the ice and snow of Antarctica as it is possible to get. Temperatures in the desert state, part of the United Arab Emirates, exceed 35 degrees Celsius in the summer, and rarely fall below 15 degrees in the winter. Not where you'd normally expect to find penguins.

But when it was penguins they wanted, it was penguins that Julian Vasarhelyi gave them. He's also done astronauts for Tanzania, trains for Lesotho, turtles for Slovenia, athletes for Barbados, hotels for Bahrain and George Carey for the Seychelles.

Whether it's pioneers, sportsmen, animals, vehicles, buildings or former Archbishops of Canterbury, Julian is the man. Whatever they want on their stamps, Julian can oblige.

Hungarian-born Julian - whose real name is Gyula - has designed more stamps than anyone else living or dead, some 7,000 in all, for 163 countries. Now 76, he has been semi-retired for the last five years, but is confident that his record will never be broken.

"You have to be a good artist to do it and every subject I can do," he says. "It might sound very cocky to say that, but I was in art college for 14 years. Not many students are studying as long as that and because of that I was trained for everything. I think that was my advantage, that I was able to handle anything."

Julian, who has lived in Darlington for the past 30 years, fell into the stamp world more by accident than design. He had arrived in England after fleeing his native Budapest in the aftermath of the failed 1956 uprising, when his involvement in organising demonstrations made him a target for the secret police.

After he was accepted into the Royal Academy he won a scholarship from the American Foundation, which took him to India, Indonesia, Peru and Morocco. It was in the latter that he met his Darlington-born wife-to-be, eventually leading him to settle in the North-East.

Back in London in 1962 he was working for an advertising agency when his director, a keen stamp collector, suggested he tried his hand at designing stamps. Julian had seen his teacher in Hungary do it, so thought he would have a go.

'I was always fascinated by the beauty of the designs. Every time he designed something he showed it to me, and sometimes I tried it myself," he says. His first commission was a set of flowers for the South American country of Suriname.

After moving to the North-East, he started teaching at Darlington Technology College, but as more stamp commissions came in he began to devote more time to them, eventually becoming a full-time designer.

"I got in touch with the Crown Agent, who orders stamps for Commonwealth countries, I received some commissions from them and it started like a snowball," he says. "Once the stamp world learned about me I had commissions from other countries.

"I never asked anybody for work, they always came to me, and many times I asked how they knew about me and they said they had seen my stamps. Sometimes I had four or five countries waiting for me. I always felt it was a great privilege."

He says there is no subject he ever refused, but being in demand had its own pressures. He worked from 8.30am to 1am the following day, seven days a week. On Christmas Day, he would spend the morning with his family but was in his studio by 3pm. He regularly worked throughout the Easter weekend to get stamps ready for despatch before dawn on the Tuesday, and he never took a holiday.

Each issue is usually made up of four or five designs, but it can be much more. One railway issue had 30 in all. The originals are normally four times larger than the stamp size and are reduced by the printers, but all must include a border of one and a half millimetres for the perforations.

Julian was usually told what the subject should be, whether the Seychelles wanted to commemorate George Carey's visit or the Cook Islands wanted a set of footballers to mark the World Cup, but the pictures and designs were largely left up to him. Libraries proved invaluable for finding images to copy, but he has also looked elsewhere for his subjects. His wife, children and dogs have all featured on stamps.

"Most of the time they know what I can do and I can do anything I like, it depends on whether I can get hold of a nice picture," he says. When the late pope, John Paul II, was elected, Julian was commissioned to make a set of eight stamps for Belize, each showing a different pontiff. But tracking down a suitable picture of the pope's immediate predecessor, John Paul I, proved problematic.

Every picture he found showed John Paul I smiling. This would have been all well and good, except the pictures of the other seven showed them with more serious expressions, and a smiling pope was not considered appropriate.

In the end, Julian had to turn the corners of the pope's mouth down himself, but he had the satisfaction of John Paul II ringing the prime minister of the day to pass on his praise for the portraits.

Not all of his designs have been so well-received, however. The nude portraits were not a big seller in Arab Yemen, and then there was the Christmas stamps for Kiribati, formerly the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

"They said they wanted a traditional Christmas issue, to look like an Old Masters' painting," says Julian. "But they didn't want sheep with the shepherds because they don't have sheep. They wanted pigs instead, and they wanted the shepherds to carry pig feed in a bucket.

"They also wanted me to put Mary in a dress, and they wanted the three kings carrying fish. And they didn't want a stable, they wanted a pig sty. I said, 'Jesus wasn't born in a pig sty', but that's what they wanted."

But there have been many satisfied customers. NASA asked me to come up with a design for a special presentation pack for astronauts who landed on the moon. The president of Gambia was so pleased with his portrait that he had it framed and kept it on his desk, and for five years he designed every stamp issued by Lesotho in southern Africa.

Stamps featuring portraits of a member of the Royal Family have to go to Buckingham Palace for approval. The groundbreaking 1969 documentary, Royal Family, included a scene where a set of Julian's stamps were presented to the Queen for inspection. Only one has ever been rejected: a stamp showing George VI meeting Gandhi, vetoed on the grounds that it was still politically sensitive. The King had been trying to persuade Gandhi to call off his campaign of peaceful resistance to British rule, but without success.

But there are some gaps in his collection. He has designed just one stamp for his native Hungary - an anniversary issue in 1968. And the world's most prolific stamp designer has never designed a stamp for his adoptive country.

"I have no idea why," he says. "My name was on the designers' list but maybe they go in alphabetical order and I would have to wait 50 years. The Post Office asked me to send some samples but they didn't even acknowledge them."

Now married to his second wife, Elizabeth, the father of eight - four from each marriage - devotes most of his time to painting. He still undertakes occasional commissions, however, although these have been somewhat sparse of late, for the same reason that no-one is ever likely to surpass his record.

"These days no-one commissions artists from outside their own country, they always want to employ their own artist," he says. "Luckily I managed to get in before they did that, and no country will ever make 7,000 stamps. There is nobody in the world who has designed that many, and they're never going to do it.