North & King Signature Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
North & King Signature Travel is a Seattle agency with its owners' surnames on the door. Jack North and Sheelagh King report more than sixty combined years in the travel business, and their specialty is the luxury end of it. They have traveled over a hundred countries on six continents; they know more than seventy European ports firsthand, plus twenty Caribbean islands. Their About page asks a fair question of the trade: why hand “your most valuable possession”, your time off, to an anonymous internet company when two people who have actually stood on the docks will plan it in person.
What drew us in is the mark's restraint. The wordmark is a charcoal old-style serif with small wedge serifs, and the ampersand joining the two names runs full-sized in the same face, which means the partnership is set right into the type. Beneath, small and centered, sits SIGNATURE TRAVEL, a quiet nod to the network the agency belongs to. Most travel marks lean on a globe or a jet; this one trusts its letters, and letters asked to carry that much are exactly the kind of typographic job we like to press.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Their source logo measures 232 pixels across, so before pressing we redrew the wordmark at stamping resolution, keeping the wedge serifs and the old-style proportions exactly as found; at that scale every angle we guessed wrong showed, and several first guesses were wrong. The redraw went lengthwise into blueberry, which follows the sea and the Seattle waterfront running through their cruising life, and into gray-sand, the leather nearest their charcoal-on-white identity. Black carries the gold foil.
North, crowned
The companion design was waiting in the name. A compass wants to point north anyway, so we drew one and set a crown above it, one surname steering and the other presiding, with NORTH & KING beneath in the serif capitals. The layout runs portrait, the way a tag actually hangs from a handle. Whether the crown reads as King or simply as ceremony, we could argue it either way.
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 North & King Signature Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.