Cagle Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Cagle Travel has designed luxury custom travel for individuals and small groups since 2014, working from High Point, North Carolina, and serving Wilmington besides. John Cagle came to the trade from wine. The cellar still shows: he holds a WSET Level 2 certification, and long travel through Asia and Australia grew into more than forty countries across six continents. His particular gift is the wine-club journey, though honeymoons and small-ship cruises pass through the same hands, and all of it under the standard his own practice sets, travel that is “slow, local and authentic”.
The wordmark is what asked for the study. CAGLE TRAVEL sits in widely tracked capitals of a clean geometric sans, and one thin horizontal rectangle encloses the name. That frame carries the whole identity, and it reads two ways at once, as a passport stamp and as the window an itinerary prints around a date. A thin closed line also happens to be the shape a stamping die is happiest cutting.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Country gray gives the black-and-white identity a quiet colored ground, and warm caramel answers with the tones of cork and cellar wood. Black takes the letters in gold. We did wonder whether tracking that wide would survive the press, since generous letterspacing invites the grain into every gap; it survives, though on the caramel the thin rule sits a shade softer than we would draw it.
The wine route
The companion design starts in John's first trade. A wine glass drawn in a single line, and where the pour should sit level it slips sideways into a dashed flight path, the kind an atlas prints between cities. Along the dashes runs the firm's creed, SLOW LOCAL AUTHENTIC, so the last sip becomes a departure.
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 Cagle Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.