Gold Leaf World Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Gold Leaf World Travel is Cathy Major's luxury travel practice in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she has lived most of her life. She spent fourteen years as a recruiter before this, and says that stretch built the networking and research habits she now spends on villa weeks and multigenerational itineraries. Her homepage carries the line “Travel does not need to be ordinary, when Extraordinary possibilities exist.” Her own ideal vacation is disarmingly modest for someone in the extraordinary business: a beautiful beach with people she loves on it, and somewhere special for dinner.
The name pulled us in before the artwork did. In our trade “gold leaf” is an old and honorable phrase; bookbinders were laying it onto leather centuries before anyone foiled a luggage tag. A travel advisor who names her practice after our favorite material, then sets a realistic gold leaf above elegant stacked serif capitals, was always going to end up on the bench.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Indian-summer follows the warm metallic gold of her leaf and wordmark, and gray-sand keeps to the cream grounds of her site. Black carries the gold foil, and there the name turns literal. The leaf's finest photographic veins gave us pause. A die holds the scalloped edge and the central vein cleanly; the hairline side veins will soften into the leather's grain, and we have made peace with that.
Leaf ordinary behind
Her tagline promises an exit from the ordinary, so we drew one. The leaf climbs at a lean, five short dashes trailing beneath it like the marks a takeoff leaves on a runway, above the words LEAF ORDINARY BEHIND. The pun was sitting in her name the whole time; we only pressed it. Portrait, to give the climb some sky.
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 Gold Leaf World Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.