Alyssa Cole × 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.
Alyssa Cole is Director of Events at Leadership Connect, with more than five years spent building rooms where the right people actually meet. This June she brought federal cyber leaders together with industry experts at the company's Washington office for Cocktails & Conversations, an evening on AI in federal cybersecurity; a few weeks earlier, her May happy hour promised the policy community relaxed conversation and candid new introductions. We admire work of this kind – hospitality practiced as strategy.
The platform behind her events rewards a closer look. Leadership Connect is a data-driven decision-intelligence company for policy and procurement in the public sector, serving 45,000+ users across 1,200+ client organizations from Washington, DC. Its homepage makes a five-word promise, Find Who Matters in Government, and describes its customers as an ecosystem of leaders shaping the future together. The company also works across the aisle, and both of those facts turn up in the leather below.
The mark, as found
The official mark reads Leadership connect – capital L, lowercase from there on – in a heavy rounded sans-serif. The o in connect carries the whole idea: a cyan hub-and-spoke device whose single filled center sends out exactly six strokes, each ending in a small circle. The whole mark holds to one clean line, and the dark version pairs deep navy #00468B with cyan #00B5DF. This is their existing mark, stamped faithfully, and it asked for a family of luggage tags. Blueberry and gray-sand carry the wordmark in tone-on-tone blind deboss, a matched pair with straps pointing left. The black tag takes the same wordmark, six-spoke node included, in antique-gold foil.
The Who-Matters Needle
Find Who Matters in Government is a search promise, and search promises make handsome dies. Our proposed Who-Matters Needle draws a thick circular dial around one filled hub. Eight candidate dots ring the dial; seven stay small, and the one at the upper right grows. A single bold needle runs from the hub to that chosen node, and beneath the dial the capitals read FIND WHO MATTERS. We left the hub-and-spoke device to the faithful tags – the needle earns its own geometry.
On the blueberry self-textured passport cover, the original floral monogram gives way entirely to the full Who-Matters lockup, pressed at generous centered scale in tone-on-tone blind deboss. The caramel keychain hangs from an antique-brass ring and carries the same lockup centered below its rivet, blind deboss again. The cover reads as an executive's travel companion; the keychain scales happily to an event table.
The Clink
Alyssa's Cocktails & Conversations series gave us the second die, together with the company's own line about the happy hour as the room where policy relationships begin. The Clink, again our proposal, compresses that room to its essential second. A wide shallow champagne coupe leans in from the left toward a shorter, solid rocks glass. Their rims meet exactly once beneath a four-point spark, and the die stays wordless – two different glasses meeting once is our version of across the aisle. On the dopp kits, country-gray stacked over dark-espresso, the same die lands at identical compact size in the lower-right corner of both bag faces, tone-on-tone blind deboss on each; the gold stays back on the black luggage tag.
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 Alyssa Cole and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.