Welcome Back Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Welcome Back Travel is Jennifer Brinks’s travel consultancy in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, “serving the Midwest and beyond” in her own words. She designs trips around the person taking them, and she checks her material at the source, flying out for regular onsite resort inspections so that her recommendations come from rooms she has stood in recently. When a trip wants specialist knowledge, a remote destination say, she calls in a trusted network of colleagues. Whether all that inspecting counts as diligence or as an excellent reason to keep traveling, we decline to rule.
The name is what recruited us. Most travel branding leans toward departure; this one plants its flag at the far end of the trip, on the doormat, at the moment the suitcase crosses back over the threshold. Their tagline says it in three beats, “Travel. Love. Repeat.”, and their mark carries the same idea in one device, a stacked hand-lettered wordmark beside an outline suitcase with an airplane arrow. A mark built on returning belongs on the object that does the returning, so we pressed it into luggage tags.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We pressed the mark into a pale sea-blue that follows the open water in their palette and a pale gray-sand that keeps the quiet of their page ground. Black, as ever, carries the gold foil.
The Welcome Mat
The companion design draws the scene the name promises. A doormat with a bold double border reads WELCOME BACK; a small suitcase stands on its top edge, and a dashed arc swings in from the upper left to land, arrowhead first, at the handle. The trip coming home. Below the mat, TRAVEL LOVE REPEAT in small capitals. We considered an airplane silhouette and left it out; the arc carries the arrival on its own.
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 Welcome Back Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.