Bethany Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Bethany Travel has been booking trips out of Millsboro, Delaware since 1996, and since March 2005 out of an actual storefront on DuPont Boulevard, where Cindy McCabe hung her shingle after years of working part-time from home. The headline on her site reads “The Internet is for Looking, Bethany Travel is for Booking,” which is about as frank as a tagline gets. Cindy's own rule is “you have to see it to sell it,” and she keeps a real after-hours cell number so her clients “truly never travel alone.” We admire a shop that answers its own phone.
The mark did the asking here. Heavy blue letterforms wear a black outline with a hairline of white just inside it, and the whole wordmark sits on water. Behind the capital T of Travel a flat yellow sun rises on pointed rays, while two blue wave strokes sweep underneath, the lower one curling into an S-shaped wake. Our one worry was that white hairline; at luggage-tag scale it rides the edge of what a die will hold, so we let it thicken slightly where the letters curve.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Turquoise picks up the bright water-blue of the wave strokes, and Blueberry answers the deeper saturated blue of the letterforms. Black carries the mark in gold foil.
Booked
The companion is a circular passport stamp, the kind you hope for at a good border crossing. It reads BOOKED across the center, ringed by BETHANY TRAVEL and SINCE 1996. For an agency whose headline says looking is free and booking is the point, one word carries the whole pitch.
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 Bethany Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.