Three more luggage-tag studies for Baylee Markward Travel
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world businesses.
An August study, the second we have made for this practice.
Three more tags for the next trip
We had already spent one evening with the public pages of Baylee Markward Travel, the boutique luxury agency Baylee runs out of Columbus, Ohio, and pressed three ideas into leather. Some stories keep working on you after the die is put away. Hers begins on a small-town Ohio farm, where grandparents who traveled to World Ploughing Competitions brought the world home as foreign coins and photo albums, and it runs through a solo safari in Zambia and Botswana to a practice that plans honeymoons and multigenerational journeys with welcome notes already waiting in the room. So we came back for a second sitting. Three new designs, none of them repeats.
Leather and treatment
The families keep the housework of the first study: three upright tags on one warm-gray studio ground, blueberry royal blue and poppy red stamped blind, black carrying a restrained antique-gold foil. The palette still follows her site, cobalt and lipstick red on warm paper cream. Blueberry drum-dyes a step warmer than the cobalt on screen; we accepted that drift the first time and see no reason to fight it now. The red behaves.
The three concepts
1. The Island Label
A round label in the oldest luggage grammar there is, the kind hotels once pasted on steamer trunks. BM sits in the upper third, two palms lean toward each other on a small islet in the center, and 06.14.27 runs along the foot. The date is our own invention, a specimen set only to show the layout. Icon and date would change with each departure, so every honeymoon gets a label that was never printed for anyone else.
2. The Ploughing Line
Three furrows converge on a horizon, and where they meet it a small plane climbs away, its trail picking up the line the plough began. Baylee tells the story herself: grandparents whose World Ploughing Competitions carried them across the globe, a farm where the world first arrived as currency and Christmas cards from abroad. We drew it without a single word. The furrow and the flight path turned out to want the same stroke, which felt like the design confirming the biography.
3. The Love Letter
Her testimonial page is headed “Love letters from across the globe,” and her trip archive files every journey under FROM and a destination. So here is a postcard back, set down at a slight tilt, with FROM followed by a long blank line. The stamp box waits empty in its corner, two bare address lines below. The blank is the whole design. Whoever carries the tag has a destination coming that has yet to be written in.
These are independent design studies for appropriate client, honeymoon, milestone, or partner occasions. No affiliation, approval, or endorsement is implied. Every image is a render used to test the object before cutting a physical die.
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.
If you’re Baylee Markward Travel and you’d like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.