Susan's Travel Services × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Susan's Travel Services is a boutique luxury travel agency in Arizona, owned and led by Susan Green, luxury travel advisor. One line on their site kept pulling us back: “Collectively, the team at Susan’s Travel Services has more than 40 years of travel experience and has circumnavigated the globe over 5 times.” Five laps of the planet is a claim with a drawable shape. The site also keeps its harder chapters posted. “From the middle of March to the middle of April, we lost about one-and-a half million dollars in sales,” Susan said in a 2020 news story the agency still carries, recalling ten-hour days of cancellations. That August she flew to Mexico to judge for herself whether it felt safe to send clients, and came home reporting that everyone there seemed to take the virus very seriously. The next year the agency took Arizona's Best honors as wedding travel specialists. An advisor who goes and looks before she recommends earns a particular kind of trust.
The mark deserves study on its own terms. A large serif S in deep blue, with a small airplane pulling a swoosh through it; the agency's name sits stacked beneath in careful capitals. Wordmarks with a drawn device were made for brass dies, and we suspected this one would hold its detail under pressure. We pressed it to find out.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry follows the deep navy of the wordmark, and gray-sand follows the quiet neutral ground their pages set it on. Black is the automatic third and carries the gold foil. Turned lengthwise on a tag, the stacked lockup reads like a spine, and the little plane keeps its nose.
The Fifth Lap
Their circumnavigation claim wanted artwork of its own, so we drew it one. A single bold globe, pared down to an equator and two meridian arcs, sits wrapped in one continuous dashed flight path that coils around it exactly five times. The dashes break wherever the route passes behind the sphere, which lets the eye follow a path that genuinely goes around. At the top of the fifth loop a small plane exits, nose lifted, starting lap six. Beneath the globe, one line: 5 TIMES AROUND. For a while we doubted five stacked loops would stay legible at tag scale; tilted together and evenly spaced, they do.
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 Susan's Travel Services and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.