Drexel Online Education – Three Luggage-Tag Stamp Studies
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world organizations.
A July study.
Three luggage-tag stamps for a degree that travels
Drexel Online Education has been teaching over the internet since 1996, early enough that "e-learning" still sounded like an experiment. The university now lists more than 160 online programs, from bachelor's through doctorate, in fields from nursing to engineering, and it makes one promise in plain language: an online student earns the same accredited degree as a student on campus. Anyone curious can try the digital classroom first through a free Test Drive. Its flexible format is designed to let students fit study around the rest of life.
A luggage tag suits that crowd better than most objects would. An online student body is geographically scattered, while its graduates carry the same credential into many different places and careers. A small leather tag on a bag could become a physical object such a distributed community genuinely has in common. That thought set the brief for this study.
A word on ground rules. These concepts are an independent study, drawn at our own bench from what the university says about itself in public; Drexel had no hand in them. The dies stay well clear of the university's dragon and of every official mark. They draw on the plain furniture of online education, a laptop on a kitchen table and the diploma it somehow produces, shapes an ordinary viewer can name in under two seconds.
Each concept arrives on the same three leathers. Blueberry carries the disciplined blue of a digital classroom while matching no particular mark. Caramel answers it with the paper side of the story, library wood and the physical permanence of a credential you can hold. Black rounds out the family and takes the artwork in gold foil; on the two colored leathers the die is stamped blind, an uncolored deboss in which the image lives on pressure and shadow alone. That treatment holds across all three designs, so we describe it here once and then leave it alone.
Degree Online
A rolled diploma slides halfway out of an open laptop, the way a finished page leaves a printer, above the words SINCE 1996. The picture makes a modest claim first, that the machine on a desk can hand you something real, and the date underneath does the rest of the arguing. Drexel has taught this way for three decades, longer than some of its current students have been alive, and the pairing joins the credential to that history without a word of slogan.
Book at Work
An open book rests on a briefcase. We will admit the first sketches were busier, a whole desk crowded with a screen and a coffee cup, and the composition collapsed at die scale; a stamp the size of a thumb forgives nothing. What survived the cut is the honest pair. Drexel builds its programs around people who keep working while they study, and these two objects sit together exactly the way they do in real life, the reading balanced on top of the job. Anyone who has studied at lunch will recognize the arrangement before the tag has left their hand.
Graduate at Home
A house wears a mortarboard, the tassel hanging off the roofline the way it hangs off a cap. A child could explain the drawing: somebody graduated, and it happened at home. Behind that simplicity sits the university's plainest promise, that the degree earned in a spare bedroom holds the same accreditation as the one earned in a lecture hall. Of the three concepts this is the gentlest, and probably the one a graduate's family would pick.
Together the tags cover most of the moments a large online community actually marks. A commencement gift for a graduating cohort, a recognition piece for long-serving staff, and so on; the same die serves an employer partner as easily as an alumna twenty years out. A tag is small enough to mail anywhere in the country and durable enough to outlast the luggage it rides on. The family images under each die show all three leathers side by side, so the choice can be made by eye.
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 Drexel Online Education and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.