ALTR × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.

An August study.

ALTR opened in Minneapolis's North Loop in 2017, founded by Kari Ament and Vincent Amendola, two executives who left CorePower Yoga to build a studio of their own; a second home followed on 50th Street in Edina. The promise has stayed constant since the beginning: "We blend the attention of a personal trainer with the energy and fun of group fitness." A session runs to an exact format, a "50-minute functional, full body workout", and the studio treats strength as "a state of mind we build with you session by session".

What drew us to the drawing board was the name over the door. ALTR sells alteration – "ALTR from the norm", as the brand puts it – and signs its work "Awakened Performance". A mark like that deserves pressing into something that keeps its shape.

The mark, as found

A tall angular A in metallic gold, its crossbar interrupted at dead center by a narrow gap; beneath it the wordmark ALTR in wide geometric capitals, and under that the small tracked line AWAKENED PERFORMANCE. The gap is the detail we kept returning to. Most letters close; this one leaves the door open.

ALTR's gold, white, and black logo lockup as found

Pressed

The full lockup, pressed faithfully on a trio of luggage tags. Caramel and gray-sand take the mark as a blind deboss, tone on tone, the way a maker's stamp usually lives in leather. The black tag carries the gold pass, and on that ground the lockup comes closest to the way ALTR wears it on the dark grounds of its own site.

ALTR logo pressed on caramel, gray-sand, and black leather luggage tags

Session by session

For coaches and the people who plan in ink, a pair of wrap journals in dark espresso and gray-sand. Here the mark shrinks to a maker's signature in the lower right corner of the cover, and at that scale we let the wordmark stand alone; the small subline would blur below legibility, and a stamp should never carry more than the leather can hold. Blind deboss on both.

ALTR logo blind-debossed on dark-espresso and gray-sand leather wrap journals

The waking line

The companion design begins where every session begins, with a line at rest. A long horizon runs flat across the leather. At its center, ALTR's own angle stands up out of it – the tall peak of the A, legs planted through the line, so the horizon doubles as the crossbar. That crossbar keeps the logo's signature too: one narrow break, directly beneath the apex. A resting pulse waking, or the norm altered exactly once; both readings are already theirs.

The Waking Line companion brass-die design created for ALTR

On keychains the line wakes twice, on a caramel fob and on a black one. Caramel takes the blind deboss. The black fob carries the design in gold, a small daily echo of the studio's palette.

The Waking Line pressed on black and caramel leather keychains for ALTR

And for the bag that goes from gym to gate, a two-bag toiletry stack, black over dark espresso, each bag signed with the waking line at maker's-mark scale in its lower right corner, blind debossed.

The Waking Line blind-debossed on black and dark-espresso leather toiletry bags for ALTR

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 ALTR and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.