NYCON Executive Director Leadership Retreat × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
NYCON Executive Director Leadership Retreat gathers a small room this August 19–21 at Hotel Trilogy on Wolf Road in Latham, New York, minutes from the Albany airport. The New York Council of Nonprofits convenes it for executive directors six months to five years into the job, a precise and vulnerable stretch of any career. Registration folds in two hotel nights and every meal, so the cohort eats together and sleeps under one roof while the training and the peer conversation do their slow work. We heard that room was gathering and wanted to see how its mark would take to leather.
The lockup earned the study on its own. NYCON sets its name in soft lowercase blue and lets the y break rank as a small flame, blue at the root and coral at the tip; the retreat mark adds a thin divider and four patient stacked lines reading executive, director, leadership, retreats. Beneath the whole arrangement sit a thin outline of New York State and the line “Unleashing the Power of Nonprofits,” so the destination was already inside the mark before we drew a thing.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
The flame gave us pause at the bench. A deboss speaks in one voice and the y wants four, so we let the hides carry the color: blueberry for NYCON’s deep blue, fuchsia for the coral living in the flame. Black takes the mark in gold. That third tag turns a quiet lowercase lockup almost formal, which suits a room of directors better than we expected.
The taxiway to the table
Latham is an arrival town; you land at Albany and you are nearly there, which collapses the usual distance between wheels-down and first session. So the companion stamp sets a small airplane taxiing down the length of a conference table with seven chairs drawn along its edges; LATHAM NEW YORK 2026 runs beneath. A table that doubles as a runway is a strange thing to defend, and we spent longer at the sketchbook over those chairs than we care to admit.
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.
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