Hyatt & Weber × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Hyatt & Weber has practiced out of Annapolis since 1979, and the town is all over the work. Their land-use attorneys spend their days where parcel maps meet the Chesapeake – critical-area buffers, or the Eastport yacht yard whose single lot arrived zoned half maritime and half residential. The firm's brochure promises "There for you, in any weather," which is a fine thing for any firm to say and a better one coming from a sailing town.
We liked them for that line, and for the plainer one behind it: four decades of fitting marinas and homes onto the same worked shore. A practice like that deserves leather.
The mark, as found
A boxed pair of initials with the full name beside it, and ATTORNEYS AT LAW tracked out underneath. The lockup runs better than eight to one – long and level.
Pressed
A mark that long lies along the tag the way a name runs along a transom, so the trio went lengthwise. We pressed it into blueberry navy and pale sea-blue, the deep and shallow water of their palette. The black tag carries the gold.
The shoreline plat
Land-use law begins with a drawing, so the first companion mark is one: a recorded plat of an imagined waterfront lot. Two surveyed courses drop from the top of the sheet with their tick marks and corner monuments in place. Where a fourth line ought to close the parcel, the shoreline closes it instead. The lot label is their boxed HW; a small sloop keeps to the deep water, and a dashed line offshore repeats every curve of the shore, the way a buffer does in their filings.
On the catchall tray the plat takes the whole field, pressed blind into golden tan arizona – a chart table for keys and pocket change.
The journals carry the same plat at the corner, one in deep wine sangria and one in pale gray-sand, which is more or less the color of chart paper.
Fair weather
The second mark takes the firm at its word. We tried a compass rose alone first, and it read as anybody's nautical brand; it wanted their sentence around it. So the rose stands in open water like a daymark, south point already wet, and the rim of the seal carries their promise with the firm's name closing the circle.
Below the rivet of the keychain fobs the seal reads at thumb scale, on pale sea-blue and on black. The black fob takes the gold, the way a binnacle takes its brass.
The toiletry bags take it as a maker's mark at the lower right corner, pressed blind into blueberry navy over dark espresso – the Bay at dusk over boardroom brown.
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 Hyatt & Weber and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.