Holland & Hart × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Holland & Hart was founded in 1947 by Josiah G. "Joe" Holland and Stephen H. "Steve" Hart, lawyers and Rocky Mountain climbers both. Their climbing philosophy became the firm's founding sentence: "keep going up, and if you get stuck, there is always another route to the top." The firm history describes its basic principle as blazing new trails in solving clients' legal problems, and discovering another ethical route when an answer appeared impossible.
Today the firm counts more than 500 lawyers in 14 offices, and its positioning reads: "Throughout the Mountain West, from coast to coast and beyond, Holland & Hart provides clients with sharp legal counsel from a vantage like no other." The registered phrase "The Law Out West" still sits underneath all of it. The mark is an angular monogram of three rising pieces beside a wide custom wordmark, set in deep evergreen on warm ivory. That green decided most of our leather.
Pressed – the wide lockup, lengthwise
The official lockup runs 7.75 times wider than it is tall, and a mark that wide wants the long axis of a luggage tag. We pressed it lengthwise across a trio. Deep pine green carries the sampled evergreen almost verbatim, and dark espresso brings the boardroom weight the brief asked of it. The third tag is black and takes the family's single gold pass; foil on black is the register a national law firm can hand across any table.
Another route – the companion die
The founders left a sentence that draws itself. Our companion die, another-route, is one peak and one route with a single decisive turn. The route climbs inside the left flank and stops well short of the summit. It traverses. Then it rises along the right flank and ends beneath a bold summit dot, just under the apex. We tried keeping the abandoned first pitch on the plate as a short stub above the turn; at brass weights it read as a flaw in the leather, so the plate keeps only the route that goes through. The die is wordless, which leaves the wordmark to do the talking wherever the two share a gift.
On the dopp kits the die presses at compact maker's-mark scale in the lower right corner of each front face, blind debossed. The stack pairs golden tan arizona over dark espresso – the Mountain West warmth of the brief resting on the most senior brown in our line. At this size the summit dot is the first thing a thumb finds.
The keychain fobs give the route more room. It sits centered below the rivet, generous inside the stitching, blind debossed on deep pine green and on caramel – the pairing our atlas ranks strongest for this green, and an echo of the warm ivory ground the firm's own site rests on.
The catchall tray is the generous pressing. Arizona is the one leather the tray comes in, and here that constraint lands well: a golden tan Western ground under a deep-pressed peak, centered on the base and clear of the stitched border. This is where the geometry gets room to behave like architecture.
The journals close the set quietly. The die returns to maker's-mark scale in the lower right corner, blind debossed on a deep pine green book and a dark espresso one – the two leathers that bracket the firm's palette. A journal seems honest for people whose work is finding routes on paper, though that reading is ours, and the firm may see it differently.
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 Holland & Hart and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.