Nichols Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Nichols Travel has been planning trips out of Edmond, Oklahoma since October 1978, when Vickie Nichols and her husband Pat opened one of the city's first travel agencies. Vickie had a head start on the sign; she was arranging travel while still in high school, back in 1966. Pat and Vickie worked side by side for more than forty years and ran the shop as a community partner as much as a travel agency. Their daughter Lindsey Nichols Martin joined part-time in the early 2000s and became a full-time partner in 2018. Today she owns the business.
The mark is what stopped us. A navy four-point compass carries a needle the full height of its thin ring, and NICHOLS TRAVEL crosses the center in high-contrast serif capitals. A tiny SINCE 1978 sits under the name. That founding line gave us pause at luggage-tag scale, since letters this small can fill in under the press; on the renders it held.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The compass's deep heritage navy chose blueberry for us, and the pale accents around the points asked for turquoise. Black carries the gold foil, as it always does.
Study Hall
For the companion we went back to 1966 and a high-school desk. A sharpened pencil sits low in the frame, and from its point a dashed route climbs toward a small plane, looping once on the way up. PLANNING SINCE 1966 runs beneath the pencil. Twelve years of planning came before the shop ever had a door.
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 Nichols Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.