Kraken Digital Marketing × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Kraken Digital Marketing is Bobby Mitchell's agency, opened in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 2015 after he had watched the small businesses around him try to hold their ground online against the big box stores. He works by a line we kept coming back to while we sketched: “giving value and expecting nothing in return.” A study made freely, for the pleasure of the making, felt like the right way to knock on that door.
And then there is the name. An agency that helps a corner shop get found could have called itself almost anything; Bobby named his after the one sea creature big enough to move what looks immovable. The wordmark holds up its end, angular letters under a towering initial K, edged in metallic gray.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The mark runs long, so it lies along the tag lengthwise, strap to tip, the way a name runs along a hull. We pressed it blind into deep navy, the water it was named for, and into a warm stone gray borrowed from its own metallic edge. The black tag carries it in gold foil.
From the deep to page one
Every client watches the same picture in the end, a line that starts low and climbs. We drew that line as the thing the agency is named for. A lone tentacle breaks a ruled sea and keeps rising, and where a chart would end its climb, the tip curls over like a pen finishing a good year. Beneath the water it reads FROM THE DEEP TO PAGE ONE.
We pressed it, generously sized, into the base of a golden tan catchall tray, so that every evening the keys land on a rising graph.
The local catch
The second design is a maker's mark for the smaller faces. Kraken's stated passion is growing a business into a local brand that “captures the market in your industry,” and every local search ends at the same small symbol. So here is the capture: a map pin held fast in one coil of tentacle, with KRAKEN set plainly beneath.
On the keychains it rides the fob below the ring, once in navy and once in pale sea-blue – the deep the kraken works from, and the surface where a business finally gets seen.
On the toiletry bags it sits low in the corner of each front face, a quiet maker's mark on a navy stack over deep brown.
And on the journals it holds the lower corner where a monogram would go, once in warm gray and once in black. On the black we left the press bare, a shadow in relief, which suits a creature that does its best work below the surface.
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 Kraken Digital Marketing and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.