Skinny Dip Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Skinny Dip Travel is a travel agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, founded and run by travel advisor Kylie Osmundson. She named it for jumping into the water, for the freedom and exhilaration of the leap; spontaneity is in there too, since a skinny dip happens on impulse or never. The biography behind the name is real. Family trips to Mexico came first, then a semester in Sweden. Yoga-teacher training took her to Costa Rica, and in time she moved to a Caribbean island, where she worked with luxury resorts and yachts. She plans other people's journeys from Minneapolis now, with all of that water behind her.
The wordmark is what asked for the study. SKINNY DIP runs in widely spaced teal capitals that carry nearly all of the visual weight, with Travel beneath in a dark flowing script, and the spacing gives the letters room the way open water gives a swimmer room. It is a minimal mark and an emphatically horizontal one. A luggage tag pressed lengthwise is the same shape. We rarely get handed a fit that clean.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
We pressed the full wordmark on a pale sea-blue drawn from the teal capitals and a gray-sand that answers the quiet white ground around them. Black comes third and carries the gold foil.
Jump in
The name invites an obvious joke, and we spent a while deciding how far from it to stand. What a swim like that actually leaves on shore is quiet: an empty dock and one towel draped where it was dropped. So that is the drawing. Above the words JUMP IN, three ripple rings spread where someone has just gone under, and the whole scene presses lengthwise like the wordmark before it. The swimmer stays out of frame, which felt like the right amount of tact.
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 Skinny Dip Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.