RAM Partners × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.

An August study.

RAM Partners manages apartment communities out of Atlanta, some fifty thousand homes kept running for the owners who entrust them. What made us stop and read twice sits right on their own page: “Our brick and mortar is our people.” A property company saying, in plain words, that the buildings are the lesser half of the business.

They mean it in ways you can check. RAM University, their in-house school, has run hundreds of live classes, and the director of training keeps a motto worth keeping: “People lease because of People.” We first walked into this world through Evangelia Voukidi, who hosted a training seminar there that grew into a company-wide affair, and the study kept returning to that image of skill handed from one colleague to the next.

The mark, as found

The official RAM Partners wordmark in black

Pressed

The wordmark is a broad two-line lockup, RAM over PARTNERS, so the luggage tags run lengthwise and give it the whole long face to stretch out on. We pressed a pair of blues drawn straight from their site, a deep navy and a pale sea-blue. The third tag is black, and black carries the gold – the one leather in our line that takes a gold foil pass, and the reserved near-black wordmark wears it well.

Brick and mortar

The seal takes RAM at their word. A round wall of running-bond brick, and at its center three figures standing shoulder to shoulder where the masonry should be, carrying the courses above them. The arc spells out the sentence itself: “Our brick and mortar is our people.” It is a maker's mark for the maintenance tech and the community manager – the people a property actually rests on.

Brick and mortar is our people stamp design for RAM Partners

On the toiletry kits the seal sits small in the lower right corner, where a monogram would go, pressed blind and tone on tone into a navy bag stacked on deep brown.

RAM Partners brick-and-mortar seal blind debossed on navy and brown leather toiletry bags

The catchall tray is where the day's keys land. Ours comes in a golden tan that photographs like sunlit brick – almost too neat a fit, and we kept it anyway – with the seal pressed generously in the center of the base.

RAM Partners brick-and-mortar seal blind debossed on an arizona leather catchall tray

The key that opens into a doorway

Keys are the constant of the job at an apartment community. So the keychain design is a key whose bow has become a doorway, the door already swung open a few degrees. Whoever carries it holds, in one small object, the whole trade: letting people in. The fobs come as a duo, navy and pale sea-blue, pressed blind.

A key opening into a doorway stamp design for RAM Partners

Threshold key design pressed on navy and pale sea-blue leather keychains for RAM Partners

Pass it on

For the journal we drew a row of five windows at dusk. Three are dark. In the fourth, a figure lifts a lamp toward the fifth, whose glass has just gone bright. Under the wall, three plain words: PASS IT ON. That is a trainer's whole trade, and RAM built a school around it. The duo comes in navy and a pale warm greige, the color of an unwritten page, with the stamp pressed generously into the lower right corner.

Pass It On window and lamplight stamp design for RAM Partners training culture

Pass It On design blind debossed on navy and warm greige leather journals for RAM Partners

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.