New York City Council District 35 × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
New York City Council District 35 is the district office for a stretch of brownstone Brooklyn: Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Its promise, in its own words, is modest and enormous at once – help a constituent get support from a City agency, help a person understand legislation. Council Member Crystal Hudson, a third-generation Brooklynite, has said she is committed to making government more accessible for more people, and the office appears to mean it in the unglamorous way that counts. When the district built its land-use framework, 1,086 residents answered the survey and dozens of neighborhood leaders sat through focus groups.
The minutes of Brooklyn Community Board 8 show the office's people in the room year after year; Janay Pierre has been one of them since at least 2023. That kind of presence is patient and mostly invisible, and it is what this study tries to honor in leather.
Pressed
The Council's circular seal rewards a close look, so we stamped it faithfully and upright on a trio of luggage tags. Deep navy blueberry sits nearest the seal's own dark blue, and pale gray sand, a warm greige, echoes the quiet neutral of the Council's site. The black tag carries the seal in gold foil, the single appearance of gold in this study.
Four stoops, one sidewalk
Four neighborhoods, one district. We drew District 35 as a terrace of four row houses standing shoulder to shoulder on a single unbroken sidewalk. Each house is a sibling with its own small habit – a scrolled railing here, a planter on a step there – and every front door stands open. DISTRICT 35 runs above the rooflines and BROOKLYN under the pavement.
On the keychains the terrace becomes the smallest civic object we make, blind-debossed on warm caramel tan and on the same deep navy as the tags. It is the sort of thing a staffer or a longtime volunteer ends up carrying for years without quite noticing why.
The wrap journals take the stoops generously in the lower right corner, pressed into chestnut sicilian brown, a leather with real brownstone character, and into pale gray sand beside it. Much of community work is writing down what someone said and making sure it goes somewhere; a journal is the honest tool of that trade.
The open door
The office describes its job as getting people to the right door, so we drew the door itself. A broad civic arch, both leaves swung open, and twelve thin paths that begin far apart at the bottom edge, then curve toward one another and merge until a single way in crosses the threshold. Past the arch the doorway stays white – light, as far as the die is concerned.
It sits blind-debossed in the lower right corner of a toiletry-bag stack, council navy over deep espresso brown, quiet enough for a desk drawer or an overnight bag.
And it lands centered on the golden tan catchall tray, the dish where keys and a MetroCard end their day. Whoever empties their pockets meets the open door first, which strikes us as the right order of things.
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 New York City Council District 35 and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.