Le Tour Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Le Tour Travel works out of Carriere, Mississippi, and Cheryl Walton is the advisor who fronts it. Her father was the railroad station agent in her hometown, and by her own telling that gave train travel a lasting place in her memories. Twenty-one years into the work, her public profile still reads like a timetable: rail planned across Europe and Asia, and across the United States and Canada closer to home. She books water journeys too, river and ocean both, but the rails clearly came first.
Her page greets visitors with “Using an Advisor Enhances Your Overall Travel Experience.” Plain talk, and we like it. The name is what asked for this study. Le Tour is French for the circuit, the journey that bends back around to where it began, and on the live site the name appears as bare type on a borrowed white-label page; we went looking for a mark of its own and came back empty-handed. A word with a loop built into it, worn by a station agent's daughter, seemed to be waiting for one.
As found
The mark this study proposes
We set LE TOUR lengthwise and let the O open into a circular railway loop, twelve ties spaced around the ring, with TRAVEL small beneath. A tour promises return; a closed ring of track makes the same promise in iron. Twelve ties also happen to fall where the hours fall on a station clock, a reading we only noticed once the drawing was done, and we chose to keep it. The rest of the type stays as plain and steady as the name has always worn it.
Pressed
Blueberry answers the deep travel blue of the live page, and gray-sand keeps the quiet of its white ground. Black carries the gold.
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 Le Tour Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.