Claritas Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Claritas Travel has spent more than twenty-eight years planning trips by hand, from ocean and river cruises to guided family getaways. The headline on their site reads “Your Journey Starts Here.” The pages beneath it make a quiet argument that planning a vacation should feel like the first day of it, and the name, Latin for clearness, fits that promise. Public profiles place the desk in Surprise, Arizona; we say that on our own account, as friendly hearsay. What pulled us in was the mark. A white nautical seal with a two-sailed ship at its center, and a small anchor resting at each shoulder of the lettering. Dotted and solid rings close the circle. Seals were made for pressing; wax took them for centuries, and leather is glad to continue the arrangement.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Blueberry follows the deep navy field the white seal sails on, and gray-sand keeps the clean pale ground of the rest of their pages. Black, as always, carries the gold foil. The source art measured two hundred pixels square, so we redrew every ring and rope line by hand before pressing. We hesitated over whether the dotted border would hold at luggage-tag scale; after a few trials it does, and the anchors keep their weight too.
The clear route
The name promises clearness, so the companion design draws a journey the plain way a child would ask for it: a dashed line wandering to an X, with the two-sailed ship waiting just beyond. On this map the X marks where you begin, which is what their headline has been saying all along.
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 Claritas Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.