Captain Jack's Travels × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Captain Jack's Travels is an owner-operated leisure agency in Millwood, West Virginia, where travel advisor Ella Thaxton plans vacations one traveler at a time under the line “Your Dreams Set Sail”. The captain of the name is a golden retriever, a real dog who works the booth at events and whose profile, in an old-style captain's cap, anchors the badge on the merchandise. The agency's name arcs over the cap and the tagline answers beneath it in muted burgundy, the whole held in a circle of deep navy with a dotted inner ring.
A round badge with arced lettering is already half a stamp, and this one carries the kind of dotted ring a die either honors or ruins, so we wanted to find out which. There was a wrinkle in the sourcing. Our best image of the mark is an event photograph in which the retriever in the flesh sits partly in front of the retriever in the badge, so we redrew the mark complete, checking each arc against the visible geometry and each word against the exact lettering. That redraw is what appears below, and what got pressed.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Blueberry and Sangria answer the badge directly, the one matching its deep navy field and the other the muted burgundy of the tagline. Black carries the stamp in gold.
The wake and the lead
For the companion we let the boat sail out of frame and kept its wake. The water curls back and resolves into a lead with a hand loop, the tagline riding the curve. Hold the loop and you hold both readings at once, the voyage and the dog, which seemed the honest way to draw an agency captained by a retriever.
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 Captain Jack's Travels and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.