Fantastic Memories Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Fantastic Memories Travel is a full-service travel agency in Overland Park, Kansas, specializing in family leisure travel. Aaron Rittmaster founded it in July 2015, after more than four years working on his own as an independent travel agent, and the agency's mission is to help each client define and then reach an “IDEAL vacation”. Their story page states the working philosophy in four words: “There are no cookie-cutters”. That sentence stung a little in this shop, where the whole trade is cutting one die and pressing it a hundred times. Then it turned around and handed us the companion design.
The mark rewards a close look. Three suitcases stand in a row above the name, a large burnt-orange case flanked by two small navy ones. Below, rounded navy capitals spell FANTASTIC over a thin orange line of MEMORIES, held inside an open rectangular rule; a small navy script Travel signs off at the lower right. This is developed lockup work, custom type with owned icons, and it presses well because it was drawn with restraint to begin with. The founding was a July as well, eleven summers before this study, which pleased us more than we can quite defend.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We pressed the mark on navy-blue and on honeyed russet, the pair of colors the logo already owns. Black with gold foil completes the set. The thin line of MEMORIES is the fussy part at tag scale; in the renders it holds.
The suitcase cutter
Their own words handed us the design: “There are no cookie-cutters”. So we drew one. A single suitcase-shaped cutter, seen flat from directly above. The thin double outline reads as the rolled metal band, and an arched handle rises from the top edge, serving as suitcase grip and finger grip at once. Underneath, the sentence in plain capitals. It is the one cookie-cutter this agency could hang on the wall with a straight face, since every trip it cuts still comes out different.
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 Fantastic Memories Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.