Google × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Nearly every study in this series begins with a search, so this one arrived feeling pleasantly circular. Google's wordmark is six letters taking four colors in turn, drawn so plainly that the whole world learned to read it without ever really looking at it. That plainness is the achievement; ask anyone who draws letters for a living how much work it takes to look this relaxed.
This study looks toward the company's partnerships world, where the job is introducing an outside business to the teams inside and staying until the introduction becomes a working thing. Jobs like that leave behind almost nothing you can hold, so we made some objects.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The wordmark runs nearly three times wider than tall, so it asked for the long axis of a luggage tag. A blind press works in shadow alone, and that moved the color question onto the leather: deep navy blueberry for the two g's, warm poppy red for the first o and the final e. A third tag in golden tan arizona takes the yellow o. The green l waits a little further down the page. Every stamp is debossed without foil; the famous roundness carries, and shadow does what color used to.
The join
Sailors keep a particular bend for joining two ropes that come from different vessels, the carrick bend. It is the join chosen when the load will be serious, because strain makes it hold tighter and it can always be undone afterward. Drawn flat it becomes the Josephine knot, an ornament in its own right for a few hundred years. It struck us as the honest emblem for partnership work: two lines from two worlds, woven once, leaving together. We drew it in ribbon widths a certain wordmark taught us.
On the toiletry bags the knot sits low in the corner at the scale of a maker's mark. The stack pairs deep navy blueberry over dark espresso brown, the study's blue grounded in something senior enough for an executive's kit.
The keychains settle the wordmark's outstanding letter. One fob comes in deep forest green, the l's color at last, and its partner in pale warm greige, the quiet field the wordmark has always lived on. We photographed the pair together, which felt right for this particular design.
The catchall tray is where the knot gets room. It presses deep and centered into golden tan leather that photographs a shade brighter than life, and it waits there for whatever the end of a travel day empties out of a jacket pocket.
The open query
The second companion is the most recognizable rectangle on earth, drawn the moment before it matters. A solid black field with the magnifier reversed out in white, then a cursor, and after the cursor nothing at all. The question has yet to arrive. Somewhere near the start of every partnership we can imagine, there was an open field exactly like this.
It belongs on the leather journals, because a page is where a question goes first in the analog world. One journal comes in pale warm greige, the color of an empty field, and one in deep navy blueberry. The mark presses generously into the lower corner, the long bar sinking as a clean slab with the white shapes standing proud inside it. Of everything in this study, this is the one we most want to hold.
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 Google and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.