Mickey Guru Travel Company × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Mickey Guru Travel Company is Kristy Ouellette's agency in Merrimack, New Hampshire, grown out of twenty years in early childhood education and a standing reputation as the person friends and coworkers already called their personal “Disney Guru.” The founding story is our favorite kind of practical. Kristy and her husband Eric were going over the family vacation budget when he told her, “You have to figure out a way for Mickey to pay you if you want to keep this up.” She did. Today the agency runs a nationwide team of independent boutique advisors and plans everything from theme parks and cruises to journeys well past them, under a phrase we kept returning to while we worked: “Our Magic, Your Memories.”
The badge is why we picked up the tools. A red circle with a black outer ring carries white script along its upper arc and white capitals along the lower. At the center sits a gridded globe, and over it a small yellow airplane pulls a curved contrail. Circular seals are the oldest friends a stamp maker has; they were pressed into wax long before anyone printed them. Our one hesitation was scale, since the curved lettering and the globe's grid sit close together at badge size, so we worked from a faithful high-resolution redraw and gave the leather room to hold every line.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We pressed their mark on bold poppy red for the badge's ring and on cool country gray for the globe's travel-map field. Black carries the gold foil.
The Guru's Circle
For the companion we kept their globe and their airplane and redrew the journey around them. The globe is a bold circle holding a spare travel-map grid, five lines in all. Around it a dashed contrail sweeps like an enso, the brushed circle Zen calligraphers leave open on purpose; the little plane rides the outer ring at two o'clock, nose tipped along the tangent, with sixty degrees of clear air between the trail's end and wherever it's headed. An open circle felt right for a travel company, since the best part of any trip is the part still ahead of you. Beneath it all, one line: OUR MAGIC YOUR MEMORIES.
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 Mickey Guru Travel Company and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.