Dell Technologies × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Dell Technologies says its purpose is "to drive human progress through the power of technology," and calls itself "a global team united under a single purpose." We kept rereading that pair of sentences. The machines are the instrument; the sentence is about people. Once a year the whole ecosystem lands in one place at Dell Technologies World, where the welcome reads, "We're reshaping the future of business, together," and hands-on labs sit right beside the keynotes.
A global program lives mostly in slides and calls. We wanted to know what it feels like in the hand. So we pressed.
The mark, as found
A blue circle with the tilted E inside it, and the name set wide beside it in confident capitals. The official lockup runs nearly eight times wider than tall, which settled our first design question before we had asked it.
Pressed
A lockup that wide wants the long axis, so the tags run lengthwise, strap to the left, the full name in one line along the leather. Blueberry, a deep true navy for their vivid blue, pairs with gray sand, a pale warm greige standing in for all the white space the mark likes to keep around it. Both take a blind press. The black tag carries the gold.
One orbit
The companion die starts from the circle. Its ring is traced by small solid dots that begin scattered and grow as they travel clockwise, until the final quarter fuses into one unbroken arc. Through the middle leans a single bar at the slant of the tilted E. Beneath it stand two words Dell already chose: HUMAN PROGRESS. Many marks joining into one motion – which is, as far as we can tell, what a global program actually is.
On the toiletry bags the orbit sits low in the right corner, a quiet maker's mark, pressed blind and tone on tone. The stack pairs navy blueberry over deep dark espresso.
The keychains take the orbit centered on the fob, deep navy beside deep forest green, the fresh green from Dell's progress graphics gone woodland in leather. A fob is small enough to hand a teammate the week a play finally ships, and small enough to still be carried a year later.
The wrap journals wear it generously in the lower right corner. On true black the press reads as pure shadow relief, no foil, just depth; on pale gray sand it sits like a mark cut in stone. Programs and plays get drafted somewhere before any system ever sees them, and we would argue for paper.
The ripple
Among the customer stories Dell tells, one stayed with us: a university team turning "oceans of data into actionable insights at the edge." The tray die draws that sentence as geometry. At the rim, loose specks drift like spray. Ring by ring they gather, dots tightening into dashes and dashes closing into unbroken circles, until a solid disc holds the center. The signal, found.
It presses into the golden tan of the valet tray, and we will admit this is the least corporate color in the study. We chose it anyway. A tray is where a badge and a set of keys land at the end of a conference day, and that moment deserves warmth more than it deserves brand compliance.
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 Dell Technologies and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.