Nautical Mile Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Nautical Mile Travel is Sean Tippett's agency in Kentucky, planning “curated journeys by sea and land”. The story starts the way the good ones do: Sean took his first cruise as a teenager, and the sea kept him. That first sailing grew into real cruise expertise, ocean and river alike, and these days the practice also covers all-inclusive resorts and family itineraries to Alaska. He works from Kentucky with his wife and children, a landlocked base for a nautical trade, and we find that distance rather charming. The title of his page reads “Plan Well • Discover More”, and he means for each trip to feel personal and meaningful.
The mark earned this study on its own. A royal-blue serif stacks “Nautical” above an offset “Mile”, with a line of tiny spaced capitals reading “Travel Company” below in pale champagne. Over the upper right rides an eight-point compass rose, long cardinal points alternating with shorter diagonals inside a loose broken ring. Compass roses are old friends to leatherwork; they were tooled into map cases and sea chests centuries before anyone printed a logo. And the name is a unit of measure, which is a gift to a workshop that lives by the ruler. We will come back to that.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Blueberry follows the royal blue of the live wordmark, and gray-sand follows the champagne of that quiet second line. Black carries the gold foil. Our one worry was the “Travel Company” capitals; letters that small and that widely spaced tend to fill in when a die presses deep, so we watched the renders closely. They held. A cut die will have the final say, and we would happily be corrected by brass.
One nautical mile
A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, which means the measure was taken from the shape of the earth. So we drew it. A graduated scale runs the length of the tag, and a small liner crosses it above the words ONE NAUTICAL MILE. We pressed the design lengthwise, the way the measure wants to run, and it felt right that an agency named for the unit should carry the unit.
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 Nautical Mile Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.