Custom Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Custom Travel is a travel agency in Wallingford, Connecticut, and has been one since 1997, when Veronica Kastukevich opened it with a fresh degree in Travel Administration. Twenty-nine years later the shop plans everything from a beach week to a full expedition, and it says, plainly, that the same loyal families now send their children and grandchildren through the door. Its brand line is “Your Vacation Store”, a rare kind of modesty in a trade that usually reaches for wanderlust; this one calls itself a store, on Main Street terms.
The wordmark earned the study on its own. Custom sits stacked over Travel in white sans-serif letters, and the baseline of the upper word runs out past its last letter as a short shelf – a ledge, almost, the kind a shopkeeper would dust. Type that already behaves like architecture presses well into leather. One caution came with the file: the mark arrived as white on transparency, invisible until we set it on a deep ground, so the study begins where our composite does, on near-midnight blue.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The tags run portrait. We paired blueberry, a deep field the white lockup already knows how to live on, with gray-sand, a pale neutral that echoes the typography while sparing us the folly of white leather. On black, the press takes gold.
The vacation store
“Your Vacation Store” is halfway to a shop sign already, so we finished the walk. A five-scallop awning shades a single display window; in the window stands a suitcase with a luggage tag hung from its handle, and the sign carries the line in full. We tried the wordmark’s shelf as a departure board first, then put it away – the window said more with less.
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 Custom Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.