Newmark × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Newmark advises the people who own and occupy buildings at serious scale, and its homepage keeps the whole introduction to three words: "Engineered to Excel™." We found our way to the firm through Sacramento, where Devon R. Atlee has worked the same downtown since 1986. Newmark's page on him reads like a surveyor's benchmark – more than 1,700 transactions across some 35 million square feet, and a state consulting and leasing contract his team has won again and again since 1997. Forty years in one market is a rare sentence to get to write about anyone.
A luggage tag of ours already lives somewhere in that story – Devon once bought one from us – and this study is our way of returning the visit. Newmark's wordmark, pressed the way we press things, with two companion designs drawn from the world a leasing career is actually made of: the floor plan, and the door that opens when the ink dries.
The mark, as found
Seven capitals, N E W M A R K, set so wide the letters nearly touch. It is a wordmark built like a facade, each letterform a bay in one continuous black elevation, and it is signage before it is type. That told us exactly how to press it.
Pressed
A mark better than six times wider than it is tall takes the luggage tag lengthwise, the way a name runs along a building's fascia. We blind debossed it into warm mid-gray and pale greige, the quiet neutrals of the firm's own black-on-white pages. The black tag carries the gold.
The corner suite
Every finished lease has a drawing behind it, and commercial tenants read floor plans the way the rest of us read maps. A skyline was our first sketch, and it felt like anyone's city; the plan is the drawing this particular career actually lives in. So we drafted one corner suite in true convention – walls blacked in the old poché manner, glazing lines along the facade, the door swung open with the quarter arc every architect knows. A dotted path crosses the floor to the head of the conference table, where things get signed. SACRAMENTO runs beneath it, letterspaced, because that is the market this drawing honors.
Centered on the golden tan of the arizona catchall tray, the plan reads like a sheet pinned to a drafting table. The dish that holds keys at the end of the day now holds the room they belong to.
On the wrap journals the same plan sits in the lower right corner as a generous maker's mark. We pressed one in warm mid-gray and one in true black, where the unfoiled deboss reads as pure shadow relief.
The open door
The second design is smaller and belongs to the hand. Inside a bold circle sits the plan symbol for a door standing open, and the field above the threshold is ruled with fine drafting lines while the sweep of the swing stays pure white – the shape of an opening, cut out of the hatching. SINCE 1929 sits below the wall, the firm's own founding year.
A keychain is the natural carrier for a door. The duo pairs pale greige with true black, and here too the black fob takes the gold.
On the toiletry bags the emblem becomes a corner maker's mark, blind debossed low on each front face – warm mid-gray stacked over deep espresso brown, for whenever the work travels.
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 Newmark and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.