EY × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
EY gives its purpose in five words: "Building a better working world." What drew us in was a quieter corner of that world, the Tax Technology and Transformation practice, where teams take a client's raw records and legacy processes and turn them into something a tax function can actually trust. It is careful work about change, done by people who spend their days moving between the model on the laptop and the client across the table.
The mark above that work is among the most compact in the corporate canon: two capital letters with a yellow beam rising past them. It moves to leather almost untouched.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The compact EY symbol stands upright on a trio of luggage tags: golden tan arizona for the signature yellow, pale gray sand for the quiet neutrals the identity rests on. The black tag carries the gold, a foil press whose glow against the dark comes as close as leather ever gets to that beam. On the two lighter tags the mark is blind debossed, tone on tone, the letters and the ray above them read in shadow alone.
Carried forward
In bookkeeping, a balance is carried forward: the page closes, and what was earned moves on to the next one. That felt like the right phrase for a practice whose whole trade is moving careful work from an old system into a new one, so we borrowed it from the ledger and drew it. One continuous line enters as a ruled account line, ticked into columns, then turns upward and becomes a rising beam, sharp at the tip, in a nod to the ray that crowns the EY mark. We tried the beam alone first; without the ledger it read as any upward arrow, so the ledger stayed on the page below. The phrase and the drawing are ours alone, an outsider's tribute.
At its largest the badge lands in the base of a golden tan valet tray, the piece that waits on a dresser for keys and a watch at the end of a travel day. Pressed blind at this scale, every tick of the ledger and the full taper of the beam stay readable.
Down to the maker's mark
The same badge shrinks cleanly. On a stacked pair of toiletry bags, true black over deep espresso brown, it sits blind debossed in each lower right corner; on the black leather the unfoiled press reads as pure shadow relief, which suits a firm that sets its brightest color against the dark.
The keychain duo splits the design's two moods between two fobs. Gold foil on black for the beam at full brightness, blind deboss on golden tan for the everyday carry.
For the notes that survive the meeting
Leather wrap journals in warm mid-gray and true black, with a generous press of the badge in the lower right corner of each front panel. These are for the rooms where a transformation actually starts, where someone sketches the target operating model by hand before any system sees it, and the notes get carried forward.
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 EY and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.