National Laboratory of the Rockies × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
The National Laboratory of the Rockies works from Golden, Colorado, under South Table Mountain, and this spring it showed the world a new face. The identity it unveiled in April is drawn from what people on that campus actually see in the morning – a peak above the mesa, and a golden sun coming up at the horizon that doubles as the name of the town. Its director calls the place "grounded in scientific excellence," and its launch language keeps reaching for horizons.
We liked that a national laboratory chose to look out the window. So we spent a while with their mark and their mesa, and pressed both into leather.
The mark, as found
The lockup reads NATIONAL LABORATORY OF THE ROCKIES beside a compact emblem of the landscape. It is a wide mark, roughly six times longer than it is tall, which settles the first question of craft on its own: it wants to run the long way down a luggage tag.
Pressed
Three lengthwise tags, the full lockup pressed faithfully along each. Deep navy blueberry answers the institutional blue of their primary palette, and golden tan arizona stands in for the sun and for the town. The third tag is true black, and black carries the gold – the one pass of gold foil in this study, the lockup laid in sun-colored metal on an obsidian ground.
First light over the table
The companion badge began as a plain sunrise and drifted, for a while, toward postcard. What pulled it back was the mesa. In Golden the sun clears a flat table of rock, so on the badge the disc rises from behind that level line, rays fanning into the ring, with GOLDEN COLORADO set in the band beneath. A sunrise on its own is a souvenir. Behind South Table Mountain it belongs to one particular horizon.
On the keychains the badge travels as a pair. The true black fob takes it in gold foil, a small sun against night leather; the deep navy fob takes the same press blind, tone on tone.
The catchall tray is golden tan arizona, which is as close as leather comes to the sun in their palette. The badge sits generous at the center of the base, a place to drop keys at the end of the day with the morning pressed underneath them.
The mesa, at hand
The second companion is a panorama: South Table Mountain drawn long and low, strata hatched into the cliff face, with a small sun in the sky and the mountain's name set beneath the ground line. It is built as a corner mark, made to sit quietly where a monogram would.
On the toiletry bags it presses blind in the lower right corner, at maker's-mark scale. The stack pairs golden tan arizona over deep espresso brown – sun above dark rock, their palette's own vertical order.
The journals take the panorama larger, in the lower right corner of the cover. One is deep forest green, close to the quiet green of their secondary palette; the other a warm mid-gray, from the same family as their warm neutrals. A journal felt right for this laboratory. A good share of what it makes is written down, and some of it is given away as freely as the view – though whether a mesa can fit in a pocket was, we admit, our question to settle, and the corner press is our answer.
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 the National Laboratory of the Rockies and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.