Island Wide Industries × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Island Wide Industries LLC enters the public record through Hawaii Contractors License Board minutes dated February 22, 2013, which list David C. Hafele as responsible managing employee and record the classifications C-21 Flooring, C-31 Masonry, C-33 Painting and Decorating, C-41 Reinforcing Steel and B General Building, the last approved in November 2012. A historical directory entry names David Hafele as registered agent of Lava Flow Photo and Video LLC at a Honolulu address; on paper, that single role is where a building firm and a picture-making one touch. A later builder profile spells the middle initial J. where the minutes say C., and we leave that seam visible. Every line on this page reads both companies as history, the way a fossil holds a leaf.
As found
Neither company left an indexed logo behind, so the honest starting point is type. We set both legal names in plain capitals and pressed each onto its own luggage tag, lengthwise, because a long horizontal name wants the long axis of the leather. ISLAND WIDE INDUSTRIES LLC went onto sicilian brown, a chestnut with visible pull-up character that reads like a tool belt after ten seasons of use. LAVA FLOW PHOTO AND VIDEO LLC went onto black with a gold pass, our one indulgence here: the name conjures a bright line moving over dark ground, and we let the foil carry that picture. Whether the company ever pointed a lens at a crater, the record does not say.
The mark this study proposes
Five classifications sit on one license, and one instrument serves them all. A floor is proven with a level, and so is the course of masonry above it. In license law the responsible managing employee is the person who keeps the whole operation true, which struck us as the mark hiding inside the record. So we drew the level and gave it an island. The vial is a long capsule with two gauge lines, and where the bubble should float there rests a small solid landmass with one low volcanic shoulder, held exactly between the marks. Beneath it stand the words ISLAND WIDE in open capitals. Read quickly, it is a level that passed. A slower reading finds an island kept steady by whoever is licensed to hold it there.
The tag trio sets the mark in three registers of an island. Black takes the gold pass, bright metal on cooled basalt, the one leather in our line that accepts foil. Forest green carries the deep green of a windward ridge. The third tag is turquoise leather, which photographs as pale sea-blue, and the water is what makes an island an island to begin with. For the keychains we went quieter: dark espresso and gray sand, volcanic soil beside shoreline, both in blind deboss, with the capsule and its island alone, wordmark set aside, centered below the rivet.
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 David Hafele and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.