Day’s Travel Bureau × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Day’s Travel Bureau has been sending Mainers out into the world since 1924, when Walter J. P. Day opened his agency in Waterville. A century on it remains at 47 Main Street. There is a second Maine office now, and the two longtime colleagues who own the agency count more than forty years in the business between them. Their line is “What a Difference a Day’s Makes,” a piece of name-play that has outlasted every fashion in travel since the steamer trunk. Any name that can carry the same joke for a hundred years has earned a press.
The mark is the other reason we chose them. An outlined globe sits at the left edge, trailing speed lines, and the italic wordmark rides a long navy ribbon the way a flight line rides a chart. Off the upper right, tiny aircraft climb away in single file. The source we found measured 335 pixels across and only 60 tall, so we redrew it faithfully at pressing resolution – every plane where Day’s put it, apostrophe intact.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
A mark five times wider than it is tall wants the long side of a luggage tag, so lengthwise it went. Deep blueberry answers the navy ribbon and the globe, and gray-sand answers the pale, restrained ground their site keeps around its history. Black carries the gold foil. We did wonder whether so long a ribbon would hold its line across real grain; pressed deep, it holds, though the smallest aircraft sit right at the edge of what a die will keep.
What a difference
The companion goes back to the start. A calendar page from 1924, the year Walter Day hung his sign, with a paper airplane climbing above the line the agency still trades on. Pressed lengthwise, like its parent.
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 Day’s Travel Bureau and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.