Accent On Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Accent On Travel has planned journeys from Henrico, Virginia for more than thirty-five years, long enough that the homepage can call the business “Richmond’s Travel Expert” and let the tenure do the arguing. The work runs from Sandals honeymoons to escorted tours, and the testimonials read the way you would hope; one client came home describing a Europe trip as a “whirlwind” that returned full of stories and memories. Thirty-five years of sending Richmond off well, and getting it back happy, is a real practice.
The name is what asked for the study. An accent is a typographer’s object before it is a traveler’s, and the wordmark takes its own hint: tall white serif capitals on a dark brown-charcoal field, a thick rule underscoring “Accent On” and a second rule picking up beneath “Travel,” with the gap between them set under the space in the name. That interrupted underline is the ownable thing here. We wanted to know what happens to it at stamping depth.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
A pale sea-blue for the turquoise their site leans on, and a dark espresso so close to the wordmark’s own field that the letters half-sink home, which we count as fidelity. On black the lettering goes gold. The tall serif presses cleanly; it was the broken rule we watched. We had half expected the gap to silt shut under the die, and at this scale it holds, though on the espresso you want a raking light to be certain.
The accent over the A
Their name promises an accent, so the companion design supplies one. TRAVEL runs the length of the tag, and a small plane climbs away from the A at roughly the pitch an acute accent would sit, so the letter reads as a runway just used. Beneath it, their own line: “Relax & Explore.” A company that has spent thirty-five years deciding where the emphasis of a trip should fall deserves a mark that puts the accent somewhere worth going.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Accent On Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.