Kiker Elementary × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

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

An August study.

Kiker Elementary is tucked into Circle C Ranch in Southwest Austin, and every child who walks through its doors is welcomed as a Kiker Comet. We read the campus's own words and liked them at once. Everyone has strengths and struggles. Effort matters. Students are asked to explain their thinking and to show their work, which is roughly what we do here with leather.

The school carries the name of Bernice Kiker, who taught music and the early grades at Travis Heights Elementary and stayed on to lead it, thirty-one years at one school before she retired in 1970. Staying power like that deserves objects built the same way.

The mark, as found

Official Kiker Elementary comet and wordmark

Pressed

The official mark is a compact stacked lockup, the comet riding above the wordmark, so it stands upright on our luggage tags. The PTA already keeps Fridays in "Kiker Blue," which settled the palette before we could argue with it. We pressed the mark on blueberry, a deep muted navy that sits closest to the deep blue of the KIKER letters, and on a pale sea-blue that answers the brighter blue of the comet. The third tag is black, for the charcoal that steadies the smaller district text, and black carries the gold.

A badge for the Comets

School keys ride on lanyards and belt loops for years, so the keychain wanted a proper crest. We let the comet draw its own border: the tail sweeps one full circle and becomes the ring of the badge, with KIKER COMETS held in the middle and five small stars beneath, one for each of the values the campus teaches. Connection is the one we kept returning to, and the badge is quietly about it, since the comet's path is what holds the whole emblem together.

Black and white Kiker Comets roundel die design

The fobs wear the school's two blues, one blueberry and one pale sea-blue, both pressed blind.

Kiker Comets roundel blind debossed on two leather keychains

On the toiletry bags the same badge shrinks to a maker's mark in the lower right corner, pressed blind into a blueberry bag stacked on dark espresso.

Kiker Comets roundel blind debossed on two leather toiletry bags

Held in orbit

A valet tray is where the day's pocketful comes to rest, so it received the most communal design of the set. One star sits at the center. Three orbits circle it at their own angles, each carrying a comet somewhere along its path, and the same middle holds them all. The word CONNECTION runs beneath, small and letterspaced. It presses blind into the golden tan of the arizona tray, a fair match for a Southwest Austin afternoon.

Black and white Connection orbit die design for Kiker Elementary

Connection orbit design blind debossed on a leather catchall tray

The first line

Kiker asks its students to show their work, and a journal is where that habit lives. So the comet writes. In the lower right corner of each journal it enters from the right, and its tail settles into a single ruled line, the first line of the page. Whoever carries it writes the rest. The duo pairs blueberry with gray sand, the deep blue of the mark beside the pale greige of its white field, and every press is blind.

Black and white comet writing-line die design for Kiker Elementary

Comet writing-line design blind debossed on two leather journals

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.