Liberty Oak Travel Studio × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Liberty Oak Travel Studio plans travel from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and much of its current public practice is destination weddings – couples marrying a long way from home, with the logistics handed to someone who arranges them for a living. Megan Delaney is the advisor its public wedding-marketplace profile puts forward, and the personal scale of the operation shows. What drew us in was the name. Live oaks line the older streets of Baton Rouge, and Liberty Oak sounds like a tree a parish map might actually record; the studio took that rooted pair of words and put it to work in the trade of leaving. A business named for a tree, sending people away from home. That asked for a luggage tag.
They also chose the word Studio, and the choice tells. A studio implies a workbench and working hours, someone drafting an itinerary the way a draftsman drafts a stair. Meanwhile the live site wears its name in plain two-line type, black on white; the rendered page offers type where a mark would sit. We record that honestly below, because a study should show what it found before it shows what it wants.
As found
The mark this study proposes
We drew one upright oak leaf and let its outline settle into the silhouette of a luggage tag, so the lobes read as the tag's shoulders and the stem finishes as the strap hole, with LIBERTY OAK / TRAVEL STUDIO beneath in the two-line arrangement the site already uses. Whether a leaf can honestly hold a tag's geometry took some redrawing to answer – the first attempts looked like a leaf wearing a costume – but the portrait proportion finally let both readings sit still. The oak stays put and the tag gets to go.
Pressed
We pressed the study into forest green and warm caramel, the green answering the oak by name and the caramel answering it by material, the way sawn oak and cut leather share a color family. Black carries the gold. On the green tag the leaf-into-tag reading is strongest at arm's length, which is roughly where a stranger at a baggage carousel would meet it; whether the caramel wants a deeper press is a question we'd settle at the die.
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 Liberty Oak Travel Studio and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.