Beth Narverud × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Beth Narverud came to Hernando County in 1987 and has spent the decades since running things there. First a New York deli in Brooksville with her father, counter service and catering both. Then, with Marty Narverud, a multi-store Domino's franchise the two of them operated for more than thirty years.
She served on the school board and later chaired the county commission. These days she practices real estate with Home-Land Real Estate in Brooksville, under her own handwritten name and the promise "Experience the Difference." A career this loyal to one county is rare, and it is what we kept designing from.
The mark, as found
Her identity is a signature before it is a logo: "Beth Narverud" handwritten across two slanted lines, with "Realtor" beneath in the same hand. Below them sits the compact Home-Land lockup, a small roof and a small tree over serif capitals. On her site the lettering rides white inside a deep crimson circle. We redrew the lockup at press resolution so none of that handwriting loses its nerve at stamp scale.
Pressed
The faithful mark goes on a pair of key fobs, because her work keeps ending the same way: keys changing hands across a closing table. One fob is sangria, the deep wine her crimson circle settles into when it becomes leather. The other is true black, the dark she wears in her own portrait. Both carry a blind deboss, tone on tone, the name settling into the grain the way a signature settles into wet paper.
A key to the county
Luggage tags want a long design, and a door key is one of the few objects that earns that shape honestly. So the companion die is a key drawn lengthwise. Its bow is a plain circle holding a small oak, a quiet nod to the tree tucked inside the Home-Land lockup; its teeth are cut as a row of tiny gables, as though the key had been filed to fit a whole town. HERNANDO COUNTY SINCE 1987 runs beneath the shaft. We will admit the first sketches reached for the usual house outline. The key stayed because it says where the door is.
The trio pairs deep wine sangria with pale warm greige, and a black tag rides between them. The black tag takes the stamp in gold foil, the one point of metal in this study.
The door, ajar
The second companion is a roundel. Inside a ring reading EVERY CLOSING IS AN OPENING stands a paneled front door, swung a hand's width open, the gap left as bare white. The paperwork calls that last day a closing; the die takes the word at its other meaning, the one a client feels standing in an empty new living room. This single die travels across the rest of the study.
On the toiletry bags it sits small in the lower right corner, a maker's mark on a stack of true black over deep espresso brown, blind debossed with no gold anywhere near it.
The golden tan catchall tray takes it at full ceremony, centered in the base. A tray by the front door is where keys spend the night, and it seemed right that a door should stand open above them.
The wrap journals wear it as a generous corner seal, for the notebooks a new owner starts filling the week the boxes arrive. The duo runs deep wine sangria beside pale warm greige, the reds and whites of her own identity translated into leather.
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 Beth Narverud and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.