KindCon 2026 × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
KindCon 2026 is Kindsight’s annual conference for fundraisers and advancement leaders, and this year it arrives in costume. The 2026 identity announces “Welcome to Kindfest” and dresses the whole affair as a Music City festival: September 1–3 at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel, a block off Broadway, with the opening reception up at the Bridge Bar over the lights of the city. Kindsight hosts every meal and drink through the two and a half days, and coaches carry everyone to the Wednesday party, where live music and bowling wait at the far end. When we heard this room was gathering, the lettering held us. A hand-drawn festival wordmark is a rare thing in conference branding, and it takes a stamp with a warmth that set type only approximates.
Five hundred and some “changemakers” are expected, which is more tags than good sense allows. Inside that number sit smaller rooms. The partner summit gathers its own circle, and the Kindness Award winners are called up live on the mainstage; a cohort of fifty or a hundred like that is the scale we had in mind while pressing these. Few enough that a tag reads as a token of a shared room, and each one can be handed over in person.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We stamped the compact official naming – WELCOME TO KINDFEST, with KindCon 2026 beneath – and left the guitar and the skyline where the poster keeps them. Indian-summer leans into the coral heat of the festival treatment while gray-sand answers its cream ground. The black tag carries gold. We went back and forth on the coral match; indian-summer runs more honey than flame, and for a stretch we wondered whether it softened the mark too far. We think the warmth carries it.
The headliner bill
Kindsight bills the conference as the stage “where YOU are the headliner,” and Nashville keeps a native form for that kind of claim. So we set it as a compact festival bill, YOU ARE THE HEADLINER above and NASHVILLE 2026 below, the sort of card a venue tacks up beside its door. It belongs on the suitcase of a fundraiser who spends the year putting other people’s generosity on stage.
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 KindCon 2026 and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.