Ray's Travel Service × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Ray's Travel Service has been booking travel out of Ada, Oklahoma since 1980, family owned and operated the whole way. Ray and Brenda, owners and founders, count more than forty-five years in the industry and built the agency around personal service and itineraries shaped to each traveler. The shop is ARC and IATAN appointed, and the wall holds business awards, among them one from the Chickasaw Nation. A forty-six-year run would be respectable for any storefront; for a travel agency it spans the entire rise of online booking, the era that was supposed to retire the human agent. Ada kept theirs.
The mark is why we picked up the stamp. Travel agencies usually park a globe beside the name; here the globe sits inside it, between TRAVEL and SERVICE, splitting the phrase around the world. White condensed old-style serif with enlarged initials, all of it on one long royal-blue banner. A globe used as punctuation. And a banner that long, roughly six and a half times wider than tall, has the proportions of a luggage tag before we do anything at all.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry follows the royal-blue of the banner and gray-sand follows the white of the lettering; each takes the full mark, run lengthwise down the tag. Black carries it in gold foil. We did wonder whether the globe would survive the pressing at this size, since the longitude lines sit close together near the poles. On the renders the little grid holds, though only a cut die would settle it.
“More than a journey”
Ray and Brenda say travel is “more than a journey”, and the companion takes them at their word. We packed their globe into a suitcase, same white line work over blue oceans, with a handle set on top, then stood it portrait above MORE THAN A JOURNEY and SINCE 1980. A world small enough to carry, from people who have spent four decades sending their neighbors out into the large one.
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 Ray's Travel Service and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.