Distant Travel, Inc. × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Distant Travel, Inc. has been planning trips out of Baytown, Texas since 1989, an owner-led agency that builds personalized luxury itineraries for couples and for whole families, and that describes its work as walking a client from overwhelmed to ready to go. The numbers on the site carry the weight of a long practice. More than 2,500 families sent away over thirty-odd years. Fifty-some worldwide travel partners stand behind the bookings. And somewhere in those pages sits the phrase “roots instead of feet”, which stayed with us all week; an agency that keeps people planted at home while sending them very far away understands something true about the trade.
The header is what asked for the study. Distant Travel’s name arrives as plain type, black on white, and the site’s own metadata offers a photograph where a graphic mark would ordinarily live, so there was never a drawing to press. A company whose whole subject is distance, and the letters carry all of it unaided. We recorded the type faithfully first, as this series requires, then allowed ourselves to sketch the horizon the name seemed to be waiting for. Proposing a mark for a firm that has thrived for decades on type alone is a little presumptuous, and we felt that while drawing; take what follows as a sketch offered across the counter.
As found
The mark this study proposes
DISTANT TRAVEL rides above one long horizon line, with a half sun set at the far right of it – the sun you chase when a flight lands at dusk. SINCE 1989 BAYTOWN TEXAS holds the ground beneath. We went back and forth on whether that sun is rising or setting; pressed into leather the question stays open, and we left it that way.
Pressed lengthwise
The long mark takes to blueberry first, a dependable long-haul travel blue, and to indian-summer, the warm color of the far edge of an evening. Black carries the gold.
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 Distant Travel, Inc. and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.