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 University of Southern California keeps a whole landscape inside its shield: three torches above a rising sun; beneath them, stylized waves. In the Dornsife college, the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures calls itself a “lively intellectual community” and spends its days with the languages and literatures of Russia and of Eastern and Central Europe.
We found our way to it through Colleen McQuillen, a scholar of Russian modernism whose current book project follows ore and coal out of the Ural Mountains and the Donets Basin into the literature of modernization. Someone who studies how pressure underground becomes a printed page is, to a stamping house, nearly a colleague. This study is our way of saying so.
The mark, as found
USC’s primary logotype: the black shield at the left, and beside it the large cardinal letters USC over the university’s full name in smaller serif capitals. We changed nothing. A mark this settled asks only to be pressed well.
Pressed
The logotype is very wide, so the luggage tags run lengthwise and the mark lies along the tag’s long axis. Sangria, a deep wine, holds the cardinal end of the palette; arizona renders as a golden tan and stands in for USC Gold. The black tag carries the logotype in gold foil, USC’s own pairing pressed in metal.
The sun over the seam
McQuillen’s current project reads fiction about mining in the Urals and the Donets Basin, and the gap between bodies working underground and the official story of modernization told above them. Her university’s shield already owns a rising sun. We let the two meet. The companion mark is a wordless roundel: a sun lifting off a horizon, and under that horizon the ground in section, band after band, down to one thick seam of solid black. We did hesitate over whether a coal seam belongs on a gift. It stays, because the design is honest about where light comes from; the sun in this roundel has been paid for.
On the toiletry bags the roundel sits small in the lower right corner, a maker’s mark pressed blind into a golden tan arizona bag over a deep brown dark espresso one. The stack reads as gold over earth, which is roughly how August in Los Angeles reads too.
Pocket and desk
The keychains take the same roundel at the center of the fob. The black fob carries it in gold foil, USC Gold doing its oldest job; the sangria fob takes a blind press into the deep wine. For the desk there is the catchall tray in golden tan arizona, the roundel pressed at generous size into the center of the base, where keys and conference badges will land between semesters.
Ex libris
A department of literatures deserves its own bookplate. For the journals we drew one: a ruled plate with EX LIBRIS set across the top and, at its center, an open book with a small sun rising out of the gutter, the same sun as the roundel’s at library scale. Below the book runs one blank rule, left empty on purpose. When these journals are made real, that line is where a name goes.
The plate presses generously into the lower right corner of the front panel, on a pair of leathers that carry the school’s two colors without a thread of costume: sangria in deep wine and arizona 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.