Leadership Connect × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Leadership Connect describes its work as data-driven decision intelligence for policy and procurement in the public sector. Behind the modern phrasing sits real age: a publishing legacy of more than fifty years, remade in 2019 into a GovTech company headquartered in Washington, DC. The firm works across the aisle, serving policymakers on one side and government contractors on the other, and its events carry the same connective purpose – virtual roundtables through the year, and an in-person Policy Community Happy Hour at the Washington office that the company frames as meaningful networking.
The mark rewards a close look. A heavy rounded sans spells leadership connect in a single lowercase line, letters in deep navy. The o of connect is a cyan hub-and-spoke node, a circular center joined to six small endpoints by fine strokes. For a company whose product maps people and institutions across the public sector, the letterform doubles as a diagram of the business.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We rendered the family as three upright luggage tags on warm gray, one die across all of them. Blueberry and turquoise, the first two tags, take the die blind, tone on tone; the deep navy leather stands in for the wordmark's institutional blue while the pale sea-blue answers for the cyan of the node. Caramel carries the same die in restrained antique-gold foil, the formal option of the family for an attendee or a speaker. In the render the six endpoints of the node still separate cleanly at tag scale, which was the pressing question – a device drawn for a screen behaves generously in pixels, and a die has to hold it in leather.
Certainly a phoenix
The companion begins with a sentence Leadership Connect published about its own 2019 turn, "We're not a unicorn, but we are certainly a phoenix." We took the line at face value and gave it a die of its own – a phoenix rising from broad flames with three feather masses to each wing, carrying the words NOT A UNICORN. The temptation was to work the hub-and-spoke device into the flames as well; we let that go, since a stamp this small holds one idea at a time. The same leathers return in the same order, blind on the two blues and antique gold on the caramel.
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 Leadership Connect and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.