Royal Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Royal Travel is a family travel agency in Winnetka, Illinois. Larry and Kay Berke founded it in 1972, and their daughter Kendra Thornton now leads it as President and CEO, which puts a second generation at the desk after more than fifty years of planned trips. The agency says its advisors have set foot in more than 120 countries and calls them “fashionable and informed.” Its own line is better still: “Travel is storytelling. Let’s write your next chapter.”
The mark asked for the study. A compact navy crown of five sharp points, the middle point tallest, rests on a shallow curved base above ROYAL in geometric capitals, with TRAVEL letterspaced wide beneath. Crowns are old friends to our trade; heraldry lived on bookbindings for centuries before anyone put it on a website. This one is drawn with enough weight to hold a deboss without filling in, and we wanted to see it in blind on something that actually goes places.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Blueberry follows the deep navy of the live mark, and caramel follows the warmth of their photography and the length of the family story. Black carries the crown in gold foil. We did wonder whether the wide letterspacing of TRAVEL would survive at tag scale; it holds, though the tracking tightens a shade more than the screen version admits.
Your next chapter
For the companion piece we pressed the second half of their line lengthwise: a blank book page lifts off and folds mid-air into a paper airplane, with the invitation to write the next chapter set beneath it. We went back and forth on how much of the page to leave empty, since blank space reads as promise on a luggage tag and past a certain point it reads as an unfinished stamp. The render below sits where we stopped.
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 Royal Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.