BNY × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
BNY calls itself “a global financial services platforms company,” and its present line is “Making money work for the world.” The house is far older than the phrase. The Bank of New York opened on June 9, 1784, with a constitution written by Alexander Hamilton, and when the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 this was the first company traded on it. The record of firsts kept running: an IBM 650 installed in 1958, then securities processed over the internet by a bank for the first time in 1996. In 2022 it became the first global systemically important bank to offer custody of Bitcoin and Ether for select U.S. institutional clients.
In June 2024 the umbrella brand shortened to BNY, with a modern wordmark and a refined arrow set in a distinctive teal. The company's own words for all this – “Here from the start, building what's next” – read like an instruction to a die-maker, and we chose to take them that way. Every image below is a render, our way of prototyping before any brass is cut.
Pressed
The 2024 lockup is wide, roughly four and a half times as long as it is tall, so the luggage tags run lengthwise and give the arrow its full runway. We pressed the faithful mark on three leathers read straight from the brand. Blueberry is our true muted navy, the closest leather answer to the wordmark's #04243C. Turquoise sits nearest the arrow's #2B9CAE, and honesty obliges a note: it renders as pale sea-blue, softer than the screen teal. Black carries the formal register of a global bank and is the one tag that takes gold foil; the other two are blind deboss, ink-free and shadow-drawn.
Ink to Ledger
The arrow is BNY's own device, so the companion had to be a different thought. We drew one continuous line. Its left half is a pen flourish of the kind an eighteenth-century hand would leave beneath a constitution; its right half straightens into square ledger steps, right angles climbing the way tokenized records accumulate. One stroke at one weight, with no arrowhead anywhere. To be plain about our framing: BNY has never described itself this way. The line is our reading of a house whose founding document was handwritten and whose current records live on digital ledgers.
Cut for a 2 mm brass die, the line holds at every scale in the renders below. On the dopp-kit pair it sits in the lower right corner of each front face at maker's-mark scale, blind debossed in blueberry over dark espresso – the brand's navy grounded by the most senior brown in our line.
The keychain duo takes the compact cut of the same line, centered below the rivet. Black carries it in gold, the one place beyond the tag where we allow foil, because black and gold is the oldest formal dress a bank owns; pale sea-blue turquoise answers it in blind deboss.
The catchall tray comes only in arizona, a golden tan for which we make no brand claim; it simply brings the warmth of old paper to the desk where pockets are emptied. Here the line runs at full length, centered generously in the base, and the flourish gets room to breathe before the steps begin.
The journals close the study with the two sampled brand colors side by side, blueberry and pale sea-blue turquoise. The compact mark is blind debossed in the lower right corner of each cover, the same corner a signature would take. A journal felt like the right ending for a company whose first artifact was a handwritten document.
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 BNY and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.