Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement has been at its work for more than 130 years. It began on Henry Street as the King's Daughters Settlement and took Jacob A. Riis's name in 1901; by 1957 the work had consolidated at Queensbridge. Riis himself used reporting and early flash photography to make tenement conditions impossible to ignore, and the organization frames his belief simply: give people a chance to improve their lives.
Today it states its mission as working to “build and strengthen underserved communities in western Queens and to act as a catalyst for change,” and its home page opens with four words we kept returning to: “A place to grow.” It serves families and young people, immigrants and older adults, across a network of western Queens sites. Here is the mark as we found it.
Pressed
The lockup is a developed horizontal one. At left, four rounded petal forms meet around a narrow blue center. At right the custom word Riis stands in blue, its two i-dots drawn as full circles, and Settlement sits beneath in a smaller dark navy line. At 798 by 274 units it runs well past the 2.5:1 line, so the tags lie lengthwise, strap to the left, and the mark goes on whole and unaltered.
We cut the trio from the mark's own palette. Blueberry carries the wordmark's blue as a deep true navy, and arizona answers the four petals in golden tan, a leather that often renders brighter than life. Both wear the lockup as blind deboss, bare relief in the grain. The black tag takes the study's one gold pass, foil standing in for the yellow the leather itself cannot reach.
The open door
We sketched sprouting forms first, since “A place to grow” all but begs for one, then set them aside; the four-petal mark already holds that ground. What a settlement house has always offered is older and plainer: a door left open. Our companion study draws one at the moment of welcome, the leaf swung wide toward whoever is arriving, and it rests the whole frame on a threshold bar cut wider than the doorway. That extra width is the argument. Welcome means little without footing, and the vision Riis Settlement describes – access to resources for “social connectedness and economic security” – is precisely welcome plus footing. This is our original companion die, ours alone, and no official mark of theirs.
A key ring is the one object in a pocket whose entire job is doors, which is why the companion lives on the keychains. The duo repeats the study's two working leathers, blueberry and golden-tan arizona, each fob blind debossed with the door pressed centered below the rivet. Whether the design survives at fob scale worried us; the wide threshold bar is what saves it, reading clearly even when the frame goes small.
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 Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.