CIG Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
CIG Travel has been arranging journeys for more than twenty-five years, and Ivonka Knight, who founded the agency, still owns it and still sits with travelers as its luxury travel consultant. Continuity like that is rare in the trade. The site opens with “Let us inspire your next journey”, and the story beneath that heading holds a thesis we recognize from our own bench: exceptional travel begins with understanding how a traveler wants to feel and which moments they want to remember. Our prospect card files the agency under Downers Grove, Illinois, though that entry comes from our own bookkeeping; their pages range across regions and ways of traveling and leave the street address to us.
The wordmark carried the decision. CIG TRAVEL stands in tall condensed capitals of dark charcoal, letterforms that behave like a stamp before brass ever touches them. A small blue serif line sits beneath the right half, its words separated by centered dots; we kept it off the die, because type that fine closes up at tag scale. The only source we could find was 190 pixels wide, so we redrew the capitals at pressing resolution. Whether a redraw at thirty times the size still counts as the mark “as found” is a fair question; we answered it by keeping every proportion exactly where they left it.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry answers the blue of that small supporting line, and country gray keeps company with the cool charcoal of the capitals. Black, as always, carries the gold foil.
The departure board
For the companion we drew a split-flap departure board, the old airport kind, face-on and filling the frame. DEPARTURES runs small above a thin rule; two rows of nine square tiles spell YOUR NEXT JOURNEY beneath it, and the final tile is caught mid-flip, its lower half hinged toward the viewer with the destination still unrevealed. That turning tile is the design. An agency that spends its days asking how you want to feel would, we think, leave the last flap in motion.
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 CIG Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.