Halcyon Travel Company × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Halcyon Travel Company plans custom family travel from Orange, Connecticut. Sarah McGovern, a Certified Travel Advisor and a mom, built the practice to make family travel “seamless and stress-free”, and she means family in the wide sense. Multigenerational gatherings sit beside more intimate trips on her books. Blended families and chosen ones are welcomed by name, LGBTQ+ families among them. Her site describes the work as thoughtful planning shaped around the people who are actually taking the trip, which strikes us as the whole job stated plainly.
The mark is what brought us here. A charcoal circle holds three interlocking sweeps of color; a layered teal form rises to the upper left while a coral-orange curve presses through the center and points right, the way a beak points. A slim teal tail drops below. You can read the whole thing as leaves or as one compact bird. We lean bird, though that is our eye talking and nobody at Halcyon told us so. The old Greek word named a kingfisher, and the windless days it was said to nest upon; whatever Sarah had in mind when she chose it, a name that promises calm seas is a brave thing to hang over family travel, and we admire the nerve of it.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Two leathers came straight off the emblem, a pale sea-blue that follows its layered teal forms and a honeyed coral-orange that follows the warm curve at its center. Black carries the gold foil, as black does.
The flock
For the companion piece we drew a family of five birds in flight above the wordmark. Each bird is its own size, and the smallest brings up the rear with the one suitcase in tow. Any family that has traveled together will recognize the arrangement. It runs lengthwise, the way a flock does, and it gave us more trouble than the emblem did; five birds want to become clutter, and it took several passes before they read as one family moving in the same direction.
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 Halcyon Travel Company and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.