Live LARGE Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Live LARGE Travel is Karen Aikman’s travel practice in Madison, Wisconsin, where itineraries are built custom around a traveler’s pace and priorities – the milestone trip and the long-promised one. Karen credits her Norwegian immigrant father with her love of exploration, and the record says the gift took. She went to Ecuador as a high-school exchange student and later lived in Japan. She met her British husband and married him in Thailand. Somewhere in the sequence she crossed from China to Russia by train, the sort of line most people would save for the end of a dinner party.
Her homepage counts fifty countries; her about page says forty-eight and four continents. We take the moving number as a good sign, since it suggests the traveling outruns the bookkeeping. The wordmark is what brought her to our bench. LIVE sits on top in tiny, widely spaced capitals. Then LARGE arrives in a serif several sizes too big for the company it keeps, with TRAVEL below in quiet sans-serif and a four-point star above and beneath the stack. The type acts out the name, and pressing it into leather gives the act a third dimension.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The stacked lockup wants an upright tag, so these run portrait. Dark espresso follows the near-black of the live wordmark, and gray sand follows the warm, pale grounds the current site rests on. Black carries the gold foil, as our third leather always does.
China to Russia by train
The companion tag runs lengthwise and borrows the best line in her biography. A passenger train crosses the full width, a Chinese roofline rising at one end and onion domes at the other, with CHINA TO RUSSIA BY TRAIN set beneath the carriages. We tried marking Mongolia at the midpoint and took it out again; the long unbroken run of carriages is the steppe, and the design reads better for trusting that.
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 Live LARGE Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.