Rick Dunaj – Leatherius Woodman – Three Leather Studies for Bausch Health
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of design studies made from close research.
A July study.
Rick, some studies choose themselves. Years ago you brought us work connected with Bausch Health, and the feel of that commission has stayed with us the way good collaborations do. So when we read the healthcare roster on Dunaj Agency's current site and found Bausch Health named there, the choice was already made. You spent twenty-two years inside pharmaceutical and biotech companies before you began running events for them; you know these rooms from both sides of the door. We wanted to make something worthy of that double knowledge, so we went back to the research desk and drew three original designs for Bausch Health, with you as the person who would carry them across the threshold.
In July 2018 a company then called Valeant Pharmaceuticals renamed itself Bausch Health, reaching back more than 165 years to J.J. Bausch's first optical-goods shop for a name the announcement said carried innovation and fortitude – Vulcanite eyeglass frames in 1861, soft contact lenses made for the whole world in 1971. A renaming like that is an act of memory and of intent at once. Today the company's purpose reads "Enriching lives through our relentless drive to deliver better health outcomes," and its products reach roughly 90 countries. Yet the phrase that held us longest was smaller and more domestic. To a team its careers pages describe as more than 7,000 people speaking 24 languages across 35 locations, Bausch Health says simply: "All in together." All three designs below grew out of that language, or out of words standing close beside it.
The Skein
The first die is a migration. Twenty-four identical birds, each a plain open chevron, climb the tag in one ascending wedge, the way geese read from below at first light. Twenty-four is deliberate; the careers pages say the company's people speak twenty-four languages. The wedge is asymmetrical because real skeins are, one trailing line longer than the other, and the bird at the apex is drawn exactly the same size as every bird behind it. In a living skein the lead position rotates, since the front is the hardest place to fly; the formation holds only while every bird keeps its place in it. Beneath the wedge, in the same stroke weight, stand the company's own words: ALL IN TOGETHER.
On the turquoise and the country-gray leathers the formation is blind-debossed, the die alone pressing the birds into the surface, so the skein reads in shadow and grain the way weather reads on a field. The black tag carries the identical formation in a restrained gold, a skein crossing at dusk.
The Keystone
The second die is an arch with its last stone still in the air. Eight wedge stones curve above an open doorway; at top center the keystone slot stands empty, and the matching stone hovers just over the gap it will close. The arch is the inherited part, the 165 years the company reached back for when it took the Bausch name; the hovering stone belongs to the present. Bausch Health's Code of Conduct ties everyday ethics to "the company that we are becoming," and we found that phrase unusually honest – most corporate writing behaves as if the building were finished. A keystone carries no weight until it is set, and this one is set by hand by the people there now, then set again each morning. We left the design wordless, since an arch that admits its own unfinishedness says enough.
The Patient Drop
Relentless is Bausch Health's own word, the engine of its purpose statement, and the third die asks what a relentless drive looks like when it is gentle. A single drop falls through a long stretch of deliberately empty leather toward a boulder whose smooth top edge dips, directly beneath it, into a worn hollow – the record of countless drops that came before this one. Two nested arcs inside the hollow mark the small gathered pool, and everything shares one vertical axis, so the eye travels an unbroken line of intent from falling water to shaped stone. Pharmaceutical work is slow and repetitive, measured in years of falling on the same place. The image stays clear of any clinical claim; what it honors is a temperament, the discipline of returning tomorrow to the same point of impact.
Rick, we suspect the Keystone is the one you will reach for first, and the Skein is the one we kept returning to at the bench; twenty-four small chevrons become unexpectedly moving when the apex bird is drawn the same size as all the others. We may be wrong on both counts. Look the three over slowly and tell us where the research missed something only an insider would catch. Which of these the people at Bausch Health would actually want to carry is a judgment that belongs to you, as it did years ago.
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 Rick Dunaj, Dunaj Agency or Bausch Health and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.