LT Travel Design × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
LT Travel Design is Linda Tollefson’s boutique agency in Northfield, Minnesota, and her homepage says the work plainly: “Designing once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences.” More than twenty years an advisor, she plans the honeymoons and safaris people wait decades for, and she holds that travel can change a life. She would know. She tells of a curious elephant family in South Africa that ambled up to her jeep and took its time deciding what to make of her. Petra came earlier or later, we never asked; what stays with her is the Treasury appearing through candlelit caverns, stone glowing at the end of the dark.
The mark is what asked for the study. A compact black emblem stacks broad leaf blades over a row of solid berries, and a narrow open stem carries the whole arrangement. Beside it a tall condensed serif spells the name with real confidence. Solid black, drawn to survive small sizes, the lockup was behaving like a stamp before we ever touched it. Our one snag was self-inflicted: the original file is black on transparent, and it vanished on our dark viewer until we set it against white and the botanical came back whole.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
We ran emblem and name the length of the tag. A pale sea-blue follows the water that fills her gallery, and a gray-sand keeps the quiet ground her black type was built to sit on. Black with gold foil makes the third. The berries are small and we half expected them to fill in at this scale; they held, though the sea-blue takes the impression a shade softer than the sand does.
Once in a lifetime
Her own words, drafted. A compass swings a route around a globe, and ONCE IN A LIFETIME sits beneath in a single quiet line. The tool belongs to the drawing board as much as to the map, which felt right for a company whose name ends in Design. We set it portrait, the way a route runs down a page.
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 LT Travel Design and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.