Preferred Vacations × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Preferred Vacations curates trips under a promise they state up front: “Out of the Ordinary. A Preferred Vacation.” The company is led by Tom Carr, who came into travel in 1998 and, by his own telling, founded one of the first online travel companies given over entirely to all-inclusive vacations; he and his wife Dianne call Georgetown, Kentucky home. We were won over before we ever reached the logo, because the homepage pauses to define its own first word – “favorite, chosen, treated with preference or partiality” – and a business that opens with the dictionary tends to mean what it says. Each trip, they add, is “Created Just For You.”
The mark is a small piece of horizon work. A half-sun climbs off a ruled baseline while a tiny two-stroke bird hangs above it. Two shorter strokes carry the horizon out to the right, and beneath the scene PREFERRED sits over widely spaced VACATIONS in clean geometric capitals. All of it is drawn in white for a near-navy ground, which produced a brief comedy at the bench: opened over white paper, the file looked empty, and we sat doubting it until we laid it on its own dark blue and every stroke came back. Single-weight line art of this kind takes a die about as gracefully as anything we press.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
We pressed the rising sun and wordmark lengthwise into blueberry, which follows the near-navy of their own header, and into gray-sand, which keeps faith with the white mark on its pale grounds. Black is the constant third and carries the gold foil.
The Preferred Footprint
The Preferred Footprint is their own name for the mindful way the company supports local people and local economies, and we took the word at its plainest. Five footprints leave the beaten path and turn toward a rising sun above their own line, OUT OF THE ORDINARY. Whether five footprints can carry a philosophy of travel is a fair question; pressed lengthwise like the mark, they at least hold a clean edge.
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 Preferred Vacations and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.