The Curious City – a leather collection for Detroit's Cultural Center
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world logos.
An August study.
Detroit's Cultural Center packs a whole city's worth of questions into a few Midtown blocks. We designed a small collection of original stamps for that neighborhood – THE CURIOUS CITY – and pressed it into leather, luggage tags to journals.
First, we split one spinning disc down the middle. The left half is a factory gear, the right half is a vinyl record – Detroit built both, and both only work when they turn. So the disc says DETROIT TURNS.
On the luggage tags the disc rides navy and golden tan. The black tag carries the gold – a city that pressed records this good has earned a gold one.
Keychains with the spinning disc look just awesome too – black-and-gold, and a pale sea-blue.
Next, we drew a question mark as a ball run. The curve is the track, and the dot is the ball that has just rolled home. Underneath sits the word every experiment starts with: ASK.
On the toiletry bags – navy over dark espresso – it sits small in the lower corner, the way a good question travels.
Then the golden tan tray, where the stamp gets to be big. A catchall is where the day's small objects come to rest – the ball got there first.
And finally, a dome with the sky on the inside – orbit arcs and a scatter of stars, with a row of little seats along the floor. LOOK UP, it says, because in this neighborhood the universe is indoors.
We stamped it on two journals, navy and black – the sky at dusk and the sky at midnight. A journal is where you write down what you saw when you looked. It looks genuinely beautiful.
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'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.