Muscatine Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Muscatine Travel has been sending people out of Muscatine, Iowa since 1947. The agency is locally owned and family-owned, and more than 75 years on it still plans cruises and group trips, destination weddings and custom vacations, from a river town that has watched departures since the steamboats. An agency guesses right about journeys for eight decades or it quietly disappears; this one is still answering the phone.
The wordmark is the whole identity, and it earns the job. Italic bold capitals hold one line: MUSCATINE in a navy so deep it samples near black, then TRAVEL in a settled mid-gray. The lean is what asked for the study. A forward italic reads as a departure already underway, and we wanted to know whether that motion would survive a deboss.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry answers the near-black navy of MUSCATINE, and country-gray answers the quieter TRAVEL, so the pair speaks in the wordmark's own two registers. Black carries the gold. We worried the press would blunt the italic's speed; in the renders the lean holds, and the gray leather flatters both halves of the line, which surprised us.
Your Journey Begins
The site greets you with “Your Journey Begins with Muscatine Travel Inc.” and we took the phrase at its word. YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS sits above a dashed flight path that climbs the length of the tag and resolves into a small plane, the sort of line an agent draws on paper while explaining a connection. On a luggage tag the promise turns literal, since the journey begins wherever the bag happens to be standing.
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 Muscatine Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.