Design Our Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Design Our Travel is a boutique travel agency out of the Greater Pittsburgh area, established in 2020 and working with clients nationwide. Founder Sarah Barlow plans destination weddings and honeymoons, and her promise on the site reads “Say YES to stress-free planning.” Behind that promise sits a quieter belief. Sarah writes that travel lets people deliberately slow life down and allow a destination to breathe life into their spirit and relationships. We recognized the sentiment at once; a workbench teaches the same lesson, one press at a time.
The seal is what asked for the study. Sarah's mark is a hand-drawn circle, two imperfect rings holding a tiny beach: a small sun over a peaked hut, a palm leaning in from either side. “EST.” waits outside the ring at left and “2020” at right, while bold curved capitals carry the name along the bottom. A drawn seal already thinks like a stamp. The wobble of a hand-inked line is the part a deboss keeps best, though the narrow gap between her two rings made us watch our depth.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Dark espresso answers the hand-inked black of the live identity with a warmer, boutique-toned ground, and gray-sand follows the pale beach neutrals of their site. On black, the seal takes gold foil.
One destination at a time
We kept turning their sign-off over until it became an hourglass. The sand falls, and where it lands it gathers into a small palm island, with “one destination at a time” set beneath. Our first sketch had the island up top with the sand draining away from it, which read like a holiday ending; we flipped it, so the island is what the falling sand builds.
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 Design Our Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.