Maxcare, Inc. × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.

An August study.

Maxcare, Inc. has kept the same promise in Albuquerque since 1995: around-the-clock support for New Mexicans with developmental disabilities, in their group homes and in their day services. Their mission line made us stop and read it twice – "Our mission is to support and promote the self-selected lifestyles of New Mexicans with developmental disabilities." Self-selected. The person chooses the life; the people of Maxcare keep it running, through every hour of the day and night.

So this study is for the hands that do that work – the direct support professionals and the teams around them, on shifts that run through weekends and through 3 a.m.

The mark, as found

We went looking for a developed Maxcare mark and found the name traveling as plain text. Plain text, then, is where the study starts.

Maxcare, Inc. name set in plain type as found

The mark this study proposes

An open door, and through it a sunrise and three footpaths, each drawn with the same weight. From one supported home a person can set out in any direction they choose, and the door stays open behind them. MAXCARE arcs above; the founding year sits below.

Proposed open-door and three-path Maxcare mark

Pressed

The proposed mark goes onto a family of luggage tags, standing upright. Two of them are cut in arizona and dark espresso, a golden desert tan beside the deepest brown in our line. The third is turquoise, the stone New Mexico wears, a leather that photographs as pale sea-blue. Every press here is a blind deboss, tone on tone, the way a quiet mark should sit.

Maxcare open-door mark blind debossed on three leather luggage tags

The same door rides a pair of keychains, one in sicilian brown and one in that pale sea-blue. A keychain felt almost too on the nose for this mission, in the best way: your own keys, your own door.

Maxcare open-door mark blind debossed on two leather keychains

Around the clock

24/7 is easy to write and hard to do. The second design holds a whole day in one small circle – a sunrise above the line, a crescent with its stars below it, the name set beneath. A maker's mark for the people who work the hours nobody sees.

Black and white sun-and-moon Maxcare die design

It lands first on a stack of toiletry bags, honeyed russet over dark espresso, stamped small in the lower corner where a monogram would go. An overnight bag for the people who actually work overnight seemed only fair.

Sun-and-moon Maxcare design blind debossed on two leather toiletry bags

And it closes on a pair of wrap journals, one caramel and one blueberry – a day shift and a night shift, if you like – with the mark pressed into the corner of each cover.

Sun-and-moon Maxcare design blind debossed on two leather wrap journals

Three roads, three houses

The last design is the mission drawn as a landscape. One road forks into three, and each fork ends at its own small house under the mesas, each with one window lit. No road reads as the main road; that seemed to be the whole point of the place, as far as we can tell from the outside.

Black and white three-roads desert die design for Maxcare

We pressed it into the base of a catchall tray in golden arizona leather – the dish by the door where keys and pocket change land at the end of a shift. A picture about coming home, living where the day gets emptied out.

Three-roads desert design blind debossed into an arizona leather catchall tray

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.