CareFree Travel Associates × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
CareFree Travel Associates is a family travel agency on Colorado's Front Range, listed these days out of Lafayette. Michelle Burnham trained at the Central Florida Academy of Travel in 1992 and came to Colorado in 1998 to join the business her mother had built. When Jan Nance retired in 2020, Michelle became owner, a handoff from mother to daughter of the kind that keeps a small agency honest about its name. She has done the traveling herself, too – her page notes that by the end of 2023 she would have visited all seven continents. The agency books through The Travel Society and holds Virtuoso membership, the quiet sort of credential a good planner earns before a client ever asks.
The mark set us a small puzzle. CAREFREE TRAVEL runs in bold italic capitals of pure white, with a cyan arc sweeping over the name and a green one sweeping under it – two routes passing around a shared point. White is a demanding color for a wordmark; it needs a dark ground before it will show at all. A deboss draws with shadow, and shadow reads on any leather. So the study became a simple question of whether letters built to fly on a dark screen could land, at pressure, in hide.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
The wordmark runs the length of the tag, the direction those italics already lean. Pale sea-blue follows the cyan arc overhead and deep forest green answers the bright sweep below, so the pair keeps the two-color logic of the mark on the bench. The black tag wears it in gold foil. On the forest green the slant holds its speed even with the screen's glow gone, which is roughly what we had hoped to find out.
All seven continents
Her milestone deserved a tag of its own. We drew a suitcase in portrait and gave it a traveler's scorekeeping: a five-stroke tally with two strokes more, set above the words ALL SEVEN CONTINENTS. Our first sketch ran seven strokes in a row and they read as a fence; split five and two, the count reads the way a person actually keeps one.
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 CareFree Travel Associates and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.