Evaluation Insight × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Evaluation Insight runs 360-degree evaluations of leadership from Denver, Colorado. The premise is humane and quietly brave: a leader agrees to be seen from every side at once, while an outside facilitator gathers the answers, so colleagues and direct reports can be honest and every voice stays private. What won us over was the company blog. It calls the busy months “Evaluation Season” and speaks of feedback “from all angles,” in the plain voice of people who ask a simple question and then actually answer it. One post mentions, almost in passing, that they aim for a ninety percent participation rate. That is a firm that follows up.
The mark, as found
A sky-blue compass disk with a long white needle rising toward the upper right, then the wordmark in very thin capitals, held apart by a tall vertical rule. The lockup runs long and low, nearly seven times wider than it is tall, and it carries the firm's whole argument in miniature: consult the full circle, then choose a heading.
Pressed
A mark this wide wants the long axis of a luggage tag, so the trio runs lengthwise. Two tags are pressed blind: blueberry, which photographs as a deep true navy and gives their sky blue its boardroom register, and gray-sand, a pale warm greige standing in for the mark's white ground. The black tag carries the lockup in gold foil.
From all angles
For the companion die we wanted the whole method in one figure small enough to sit under a thumb. The result is a dial: thirty-four small wedges arranged around a circle, each pointing inward, one voice per ten degrees. At the upper right the ring parts, and a single slender needle leaves through the gap on exactly the heading their own needle takes. Every angle speaks toward the center, and one line comes out knowing where to go. Beneath the dial sit the words FROM ALL ANGLES.
On the keychains the dial sits blind debossed below the rivet, in navy blueberry and in pale gray-sand.
The toiletry bags take it as a small maker's mark in the lower right corner, navy over deep-brown dark espresso, pressed blind so it reads as a quiet shadow in the grain.
And the catchall tray, in golden-tan arizona, gives the dial room to breathe. A tray is where the day's pockets empty out at night; we liked the thought of it ending on a circle that listened all the way around.
The circle that climbs
The journals asked for a different figure, since a journal is where feedback goes after the report has been read. The old blog keeps circling back to periodic evaluation and to constant improvement, so we drew exactly that: one unbroken line that loops a full circle, gains a little height, loops again, and after the third pass straightens into a small arrow on the familiar upper-right heading. We tried a plain rising arrow first. It said growth, and said nothing about return, and the return is the point of evaluating more than once. A circle that ends where it began is only a circle; this one climbs.
The duo is pressed generously in the lower right corner, on navy blueberry and on country-gray, a warm mid-gray close to the rim of their compass. Beneath the line run two words from their own vocabulary: CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT.
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 Evaluation Insight and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.