Italian Roads Travel Co. × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Italian Roads Travel Co. plans European travel, Italy above all, for people who care what they drive there. Bryan Wells, the advisor behind the practice, has been crossing Europe since 1983. Two years of living in Germany lit the fuse, and friends who watched him go back again and again finally said he “should just be a tour guide.” He listened. From Salt Lake City, Utah, he now builds Italian road trips around the right supercar or the right motorcycle, with factory tours and the occasional private museum folded in. The homepage says it plainly: “Italy… beauty, elegance, and horsepower.” It also allows that this is travel for “those that are fussy about their transportation.” We keep a similar fussiness about hides, so the kinship was easy to feel.
The mark earns a study on its own terms. Large classical serif capitals spell ITALIAN ROADS in white across a solid black field; a tricolor rule runs the full width beneath, green at the left edge and red at the right, and TRAVEL CO. sits centered under it in smaller capitals. Black field and white letters, with a stripe of flag between. It reads like a plate screwed to the dashboard of something fast and old, drawn by someone who knew where it was going.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
At nearly five times wider than tall, the wordmark runs the length of the tag. Deep forest green follows the left band of the tricolor rule, and bright poppy red answers it from the right. Black takes the gold foil. We wondered whether that thin rule would survive at tag scale; pressed blind, it holds as geometry, and the leather underneath does the work the ink used to do.
Horsepower
A road folds through three switchbacks up the face of the tag and hands one open-top touring car, a shape of our own invention, to the summit. Beneath the climb run the words the homepage already chose, BEAUTY ELEGANCE HORSEPOWER. On screen those words trail a true ellipsis; dots press poorly at die scale, so the leather keeps the words and lets the pause go.
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 Italian Roads Travel Co. and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.