Culture Traveler × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
For over a decade, Culture Traveler has designed journeys for a discerning, globally minded clientele. Founder and CEO Kareem George joined the travel industry in 2013 and has since visited more than seventy countries and all seven continents; Africa and Western Europe are the regions he names as his passions, and he speaks of the whole enterprise as a way of building greater global understanding. Every public listing we could find places the practice in Franklin, Michigan, which pleases us – a man who has stood on seven continents keeps his desk in a quiet village outside Detroit. The logo carries its promise in tiny spaced capitals: “LUXURY • DISCOVERY • INSPIRATION”.
The mark drew us before the story did. An oversized scripted lowercase ct opens it, and its tail runs on as one long horizontal stroke beneath serif capitals reading CULTURE TRAVELER, so the whole name hangs from a single line of ink. Wide marks like this ask to be read the way a boarding pass is read, left to right in one motion. A luggage tag laid lengthwise gives them exactly that.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry follows the medium blue of the mark directly; country gray answers the cool editorial ground their site rests on. Black carries the gold foil, as it always does here. The spaced capitals beneath the name sit near the limit of what a die holds at tag width, so we kept the serif name with its long stroke and let the underline with its small lettering go – part of us still wonders whether the mark misses them.
Discovery
The companion design takes the middle word of their tagline at its word. A magnifying glass circles a silhouette of Africa, the first of Kareem's named loves, and the lens carries LUXURY DISCOVERY INSPIRATION around it. We set it portrait, so the tag hangs like a small instrument for finding things.
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 Culture Traveler and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.