Montgomery County Community College × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Montgomery County Community College has taught its county since 1964, from a campus in Blue Bell and a second in Pottstown, and counts more than 90,000 alumni. Its brand guide asks everyday audiences to say "Montco." The College's sixth president, Dr. Victoria L. Bastecki-Perez, took office in May 2020 after a long career inside the institution, and is herself a first-generation college graduate. Under her leadership the College reports roughly $98 million in capital work, from a renewed Science Center to Pennsylvania's first Challenger Learning Center.
The language around this place is unusually warm for its scale. The president's biography calls her an "empathetic professional who leads with mind and heart," and says the College works "to inspire, lead, and transform destinies and future generations." In December 2025 it launched the MCCC (PA) Legacy Fund as its official philanthropic arm, and it reports being the first community college in the country to offer 24/7 online mental-health therapy. We take these claims as the College states them; they read like an institution that means what it says.
Pressed – the Montco lockup, lengthwise
The logo is a wide horizontal mark, a small college hall beside a two-line wordmark, roughly five and a half times wider than tall. Geometry that wide decides the product for us: a lengthwise luggage tag, strap to the left, the lockup running the full length of the face. We pressed a trio. Poppy red carries the mandatory Montco Red, Pantone 186, #C8102E. Sangria takes the guide's dark red, #930A28, into a deeper collegiate register. The third tag is black for the dark-gray side of the system, and there the mark goes down in gold foil, since our contrast check showed the College's dark asset sinking into a black ground. Both red tags are blind deboss, plain pressure into plain leather.
One Road – the companion die
For the companion we wanted a single idea that survives every scale from a tray base down to a twelve-millimetre journal corner, and the College handed it to us in its own geography. Two campuses, one college. One Road draws two roads entering from the lower corners of the plate, merging at its centre, then running as one tapering band toward a short horizon bar. That is the entire die. It borrows nothing from the hall device in the official logo, and it carries the College's verified talk of transforming destinies as pure geometry.
On the dopp-kit stack the road sits in the lower right corner of each front face at maker's-mark scale. We chose the black-over-dark-espresso pair, the most senior stack we photograph, for the president's-office end of the gift range. The kits stay foil-free; on black, an unfoiled press reads as a quiet shadow relief, and we find that restraint suits an executive bag.
The keychain duo puts the guide's two reds side by side, poppy red and sangria, each fob pressed centered below the rivet. Handed out in quantity, this is the piece a first-generation graduate might still carry a decade on.
The catchall tray comes in arizona only, a golden tan that photographs sunlit. Here the die finally gets room; the road presses large and centered in the base, clear of the stitched border, and the perspective taper can actually work.
The journals close the set in sangria and country gray, wine beside warm stone, with the road at the same lower-right corner it holds on the kits. Whether a die this spare would still read as a road at twelve millimetres was the honest test of the concept; in these renders it does, though the horizon bar carries more of the reading than we expected.
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 Montgomery County Community College and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.