University of Southern California × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California teaches Russian and Polish on a campus founded in 1880, and it does the quiet work small humanities departments do everywhere: it keeps whole worlds within walking distance of a classroom. We came to it through Colleen McQuillen, a scholar of Russian modernism who has chaired the department. She wrote a book on the masquerades of that era, and the book she is writing now follows Russia's literature of modernization down into its mines. What won us over, though, was her own account of teaching. Her students have built story maps of novels and, on one occasion we cherish, revised rap lyrics about Peter the Great. A department that reads this seriously and enjoys it this much deserves objects made in the same spirit.
The mark, as found
The university's primary logotype sets a finely drawn shield beside USC in tall cardinal serifs, with the full wordmark alongside in black. The shield rewards a closer look than most people ever give it; torches burn inside it, and a sun rises. Those two images became the seed of everything below.
Pressed
The logotype is wide, so it runs faithfully along the long axis of a luggage tag in true black, and on black the press carries gold, the university's own second color. Two upright companions stand beside it, a deep wine tag and a golden tan one, which between them bring the cardinal and the gold of the identity into leather. Their designs are introduced below.
The reading lamp
USC hands its people torches. We asked what a Slavic department actually does with light, and the honest answer is that it reads by it, often late. So the companion mark is a miner's safety lamp hung from a short chain, its flame a small rising sun, with an open book beneath catching the glow. The lamp belongs to the miners of the Urals and the Donets Basin in the book McQuillen is writing, and just as much to anyone finishing a chapter the night before a seminar. We did hesitate over whether a pit lamp is too literal for a literature department, and then decided the literalness is the point; hers is a literature that goes underground.
On keychains the lamp travels as a pair, a true black fob where the die takes a pass of gold and a deep wine fob pressed blind.
At maker's-mark scale the same lamp sits in the lower right corner of a toiletry bag stack, golden tan over deep brown, pressed blind as all our toiletry bags are. Conference travel is real in this field. The bag is for the colleague who lands in a distant city the evening before their panel and still wants to look composed at nine the next morning.
The strata page
The second companion design belongs to the journals, and it is the one we drew for her book in progress. An upright page holds its ruled lines steady for a while; then the lines thicken and fold into geological strata, and a bookmark ribbon drops through the whole depth like a mine shaft, coming to rest beside a small crystal in the deepest band. The official story of modernization sits on top; the ground underneath tells its own. Anyone who has written a dissertation will recognize the picture from inside. This page also stands upright on the deep wine tag of the family above.
In leather, the journals pair a deep wine cover with a golden tan one, cardinal and gold again, each pressed generously in the lower right corner of the front panel. We imagine them at the department's milestones, a defended dissertation or a visiting lecturer's week, and filling up on the flight home.
The crossing
For the catchall tray we drew its own medallion, made for the moment a traveler comes home. A torch stands on its western shore and a skyline of onion domes rises on its eastern one; between them, over rolling waves and a rising sun, a dotted route arcs from flame to dome. The department makes that crossing constantly, in study abroad and in the daily work of teaching languages across an ocean. A tray by the door is where the keys and the coins land when the crossing is done. It is pressed blind, at generous size, in golden tan.
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 the University of Southern California and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.