Cheat Lake Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Cheat Lake Travel is Eric Westfall's agency, and he has been turning travel dreams into realities since 2017. He tells you where it began on his About page: a first trip to Europe showed him what travel can do to a person, and that the moments it hands you can linger long after the journey ends. His line is “Your Adventure Starts Here”, and the wordmark takes the promise literally. A thin flight path climbs and dips through the white capitals of CHEAT LAKE TRAVEL and resolves into a small airplane above the right half of the name. A logo that draws its own journey is already halfway to being a die.
The name is pure geography, by the way – the lake is a long blue reach of the dammed Cheat River just east of Morgantown, West Virginia. We liked that the agency carries its home water in its name, though we suspect most of Eric's bookings point a good deal farther east.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
The source art is long and low, 4089 pixels against 710, so it runs the length of the tag like a runway. All of it arrives white, which vanishes on a white page and sings on the deep blue-black of their site; leather settles that question with shadow and relief. Blueberry follows the blue-black field the mark flies on, and gray-sand follows the restrained neutral half of the same visual system. Black carries the gold foil, and the tiny airplane takes to gold especially well. We set the spaced-capital tagline aside for these presses – at tag scale it closes up into a smudge, and the flight path deserves clean air.
Your adventure starts here
The companion gives Eric's line the scene it implies. A lake horizon runs across the die, with a map pin planted on the near shore and an airplane climbing off the far one. Beneath the scene sits YOUR ADVENTURE STARTS HERE, at a size the tag can honor. It reads like a postcard from a trip that has yet to happen, which seems about right for a travel agent.
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 Cheat Lake Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.