Northstar Travel Company × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Northstar Travel Company is Andrew Hallfrisch's travel practice, founded in 2020 and run from the Twin Cities by a man who grew up in northern Minnesota. The name honors the North Star State, and Andrew says it carries his mission too: to guide clients through the planning the way the star once guided travelers. He builds warm-weather trips to places like Hawaii and French Polynesia, and his profile counts more than fifteen cruises alongside inspections of over forty all-inclusive resorts. By his own account the logo colors stand for beach sand and ocean. A palette a maker can hold.
The mark earns its study on geometry alone. A faceted star sits at the left, a lime point above blades of mint and teal, with an ocean-blue blade at the lower right, every facet parted by a narrow white channel. Those channels are what a die loves; they press into crisp tooled lines where a softer mark would blur. NORTHSTAR runs in bold geometric capitals with TRAVEL COMPANY letterspaced beneath, and the lockup lies flat and long, which suits a tag. We tried the star alone first and it floated; the wordmark gives it ballast, so the full lockup went on.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Two leathers came straight from Andrew's own reading of his colors, a pale sea-blue for the ocean and a gray-sand for the beach. Black carries the gold foil.
The star route
For the companion we let the star do its stated work. A north star holds the top of a portrait tag and a dotted route runs south from it to a small palm island, the whole trip in one line. There is a quiet joke in a Minnesotan pointing everyone toward warm water, and we kept it quiet; an earlier, wavier route read as indecision, so the line runs true.
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 Northstar Travel Company and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.