Ohio University × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
William K. Rawlins is Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University, and he has spent a working lifetime on a question most fields leave to the poets: what friendship is, and what it asks of the people who keep it. Friendship Matters came in 1992, The Compass of Friendship in 2009; each won the Gerald R. Miller Book Award. His school honored him repeatedly for teaching and for mentoring, in one year for both at once. We read his faculty page and simply liked him.
We made this page as a tribute in pressed leather, with his real circle in mind – the students and friends a career like his gathers.
The mark, as found
Four arched capitals, OHIO, over the smaller word UNIVERSITY, all in the university's deep Cutler green. A compact, dignified mark that presses beautifully at small sizes.
Pressed
The arched mark stands upright on the tag face and presses blind, so the letters live as shadow relief in the grain. We chose forest green for the deep Cutler green of the mark itself, and gray sand, a pale warm greige, for the cream the university sets that green on. A third tag in golden arizona tan picks up the muted gold that runs quietly through the official palette. The university signs itself "FOREVER OHIO", and a luggage tag seems a fair keeper of that promise; it is the object here that travels farthest from Athens and is built to come back.
A shared north
Rawlins called his 2009 book The Compass of Friendship, and we took the instrument at its word. A compass built for one traveler carries a single needle. Ours carries two, rising from the same pivot, tips leaning toward the same small star at twelve o'clock – two bearings a few degrees apart, in steady agreement about north. Around the lower rim the band reads A SHARED NORTH. We tried setting a line from his books there first and stopped; a quotation pressed into leather begins to behave like a plaque, and this should behave like an instrument that still gets used.
On the wrap journals the compass sits generously in the lower right corner of the front panel, pressed blind on forest green and on gray sand – the same green-on-cream conversation the university's own pages keep. For a scholar of dialogue and narrative, a journal was the obvious carrier; it is the one object in the study that expects to be written in.
The catchall tray carries the emblem at full size, centered in golden arizona tan. A tray keeps a small evening ritual: coming home and setting down the keys where they belong. North, found again by evening.
Two paths
The other grammar in his work is dialectical: friends hold openness against privacy, nearness against distance, and the holding never quite settles. The second emblem draws that long negotiation as plainly as we could manage – two lines that leave together and arrive side by side, crossing twice along the way; each end is marked with a small dot, and the final pair sits closer than the first. We left the emblem wordless. The lines say enough.
The keychain duo wears it on the fob face, pressed blind on forest green and on pale sea-blue, the soft water color the university keeps at the edge of its palette. A keychain is the most companionable object here; it rides in a pocket and gets handed from friend to friend.
On the toiletry bags the emblem sits small in the lower right corner of each front face, at maker's-mark scale, pressed blind on a stack of golden arizona tan over deep espresso brown – the palette's quiet gold above the most senior brown in our line, which felt right for an emeritus.
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 Professor Rawlins or Ohio University and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.