Gabriela C. Wittich × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Gabriela C. Wittich turns up in the public record at the quiet hinge where paper becomes construction. She is a commercial surety professional in Boston, an authorized attorney-in-fact, and on bond after bond her signature is the moment a promise becomes something a county can accept and a contractor can build on. Airport packages one season, highway qualifications the next; the projects change and the signature recurs.
We press marks into leather for a living, so we admire people whose names do heavy lifting. Hers does. This study is our way of saying so.
The mark, as found
Her identity in the record is plain type. The powers of attorney set her name in the same upright capitals as the obligations they authorize, so we began there, letter for letter.
The mark this study proposes
Then we asked what a personal seal for this work would look like. Ours is a ring bearing her name above and her office below, and at the center a keystone crowning an arch. The keystone is the stone that lets an arch carry weight; a surety bond does the same for a project, and an attorney-in-fact is the hand that sets it. The ring reads like the embossed seals that crowd the last pages of an executed bond, which is exactly the company this mark intends to keep.
Pressed
The seal stands upright on a trio of luggage tags. Navy and pale warm greige take a blind press, the navy drawn from the institutional blue that heads the procurement documents her signature lives in, the greige from the warm paper of the scanned records. The black tag carries the gold, and the gold pass reads like seal brass.
Two for the keyring
The same seal sits on a pair of fobs at pocket scale. One is navy with a blind press; the other is true black, and there the seal goes down in gold, small and bright, the way a notary crimp catches light on a signature page.
By these presents
Nearly every bond opens with the same incantation, and we have always liked how confident it sounds. So we set it as a companion design: KNOW ALL PERSONS in small capitals with BY THESE PRESENTS beneath. Under both runs a ruled line, a looping flourish riding it toward a small pressed disc where a seal would sit. The flourish stays anonymous on purpose. Whoever holds the object supplies the signature.
On a duo of wrap journals it sits generously in the lower right corner, navy beside pale warm greige. A journal seemed the right home for opening language.
The toiletry stack takes it smaller, a maker's mark in the lower right corner of each bag, navy over deep brown, pressed blind. We will admit the record stays silent on who would receive these, contractor clients or a team down the hall, so we designed for any hand that checks the wording twice.
The span
The last design began as a doodle we kept: a bridge in elevation whose roadway starts out as a signature. The flourish loops twice and settles into the deck; below, an arch takes the load through its keystone. That is roughly what commercial surety looks like to us from the outside, though we grant the paperwork is harder than the drawing.
It is pressed at the center of a golden tan valet tray, the catchall that holds keys and pens at the end of the day. The leather photographs bright, like the brass fittings on old seal presses.
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 Gabriela C. Wittich and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.