Ken Kline × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Ken Kline is a senior human resources leader from East Bend, North Carolina, in the quiet country northwest of Winston-Salem, with Wilmington University behind him. His public trace is small and warm: gratitude for his family, and a soft spot for "our old Kentucky home." What he shows of his work is a steady attention to how workplaces keep and recognize their people. A colleague describes him as a go-getter, diligent at motivating people toward change and glad to meet a new idea.
Where he works goes unnamed here, on purpose. The record keeps that door closed, and we found we liked the study better for it. With the company set aside, what remains is a person whose whole trade is noticing other people's work, and that felt like enough to design from.
The name, as found
Ken's public identity travels light: a name, eight capitals and the space between them. We set it first in plain type, exactly as found, because an honest study starts from what is actually there.
The mark this study proposes
We hesitated over whether a study this private should propose a mark at all; plain type has a dignity of its own. But the two K's of his name kept leaning toward each other, and eventually we let them meet. Each keeps its upright stem; their arms reach inward and touch, and between the two posts a diamond appears – the brace of a field gate. Read as letters, it is his monogram. Tip your head and it becomes a gate, which strikes us as the true emblem of senior HR work: most of its finest moments happen at a threshold, and consist of holding it open for somebody else. His name runs beneath in letterspaced capitals.
Pressed
The mark is compact, so on the luggage tags it stands upright. The family runs in warm caramel and deep wine sangria; the black tag carries the gold.
The toiletry kits stack warm caramel over deep espresso brown. The gate presses blind into the lower right corner of each bag, at the small scale a maker uses to sign – the kind of detail a traveler finds on the second morning, when a gift starts becoming a belonging.
The keychains ride in navy blueberry and black. The navy fob takes a blind press; on black, the gate goes gold, since a small gilded gate on a working set of keys comes closer to a long-service award than most plaques ever manage.
The open gate
One compact mark can carry an identity, but the people Ken's work touches deserved a design of their own. The companion is a roundel: the same gate, standing open now in a rail fence, with a path running through the gateway and thinning toward the horizon. The diamond brace from the monogram sits in the gate's panel, so the two designs stay one family. It carries no words; the picture already says the sentence.
On the catchall tray the roundel takes the center of the base, pressed blind into golden tan arizona – the place where a day empties its pockets, watched over by an open gate.
The journals close the study, a pair in deep wine sangria and pale gray sand, the roundel pressed generously in the lower right corner. Of everything here, the journal is the object most honest about the future; its pages are blank on purpose. Handed to a colleague at a milestone, it explains the gift without a card.
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 Ken Kline and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.