Western Colorado University Foundation – Luggage Tag Stamp Studies
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world organizations.
A July study.
The Western Colorado University Foundation has raised and stewarded private support for Western Colorado University since its founding in 1975. It is an independent nonprofit, and its current priorities run from scholarships to faculty and campus needs, with donor stewardship threaded through all of it. The setting matters as much as the mission here: Western sits in the Gunnison Valley, and its identity is inseparable from Mountaineers and high-altitude outdoor life. Students there are called Mountaineers, and the name is mostly literal.
Two verified facts shaped these dies. The Elevate Western campaign launched in 2019 with an $80 million, seven-year goal; by February 2026 it had raised roughly $104 million. And beginning in fall 2026, the Gunnison Valley Promise will cover tuition for eligible local graduates, carried by donor funding and community partnerships. One fact describes a summit already passed; the other, a trail still being marked for people who have yet to start walking. Both turn out to be unusually easy to draw.
A luggage tag suits this work better than most recognition objects. Advancement is travel-heavy by nature, with donor visits going one way and alumni gatherings the other, and a tag is one of the few keepsakes that goes along for the trip. It stays useful for a campaign celebration or a staff milestone, for a Heritage Society thank-you or a distinguished-alumni evening, in any season the calendar offers.
Three stamping concepts
Past the Flag
A small climber works up a slope, and below the climber a flag stands planted in the snow. At first glance it is a simple hiking scene. The slower reading hangs on the order of things: the flag marks where somebody once decided the top was, and the figure has kept going. Elevate Western planted its flag at $80 million in 2019; by February 2026 the total stood near $104 million, so anyone still climbing is, by definition, past the flag. Moving the flag below the figure turns a familiar triumph scene into a quieter thought about what a goal is actually for.
The Next Stone
The second die catches a hand setting the top stone on a trail cairn. Walkers above treeline know the gesture; where the path fades, stacked stones carry the route forward, and every stack was built by someone who had already found the way. Underneath the picture sits the Gunnison Valley Promise. From fall 2026, eligible graduates of local schools will have their tuition covered, funded through community partnerships and donor gifts – the same gesture at a much larger scale, a stone set where the way ahead is hard to see. A cairn is also honest about proportion. One stone is small, and it means what it means because of the stones beneath it.
Mountain in the Envelope
Western's official mark builds a snow-capped peak out of angular planes, red above and gray below, and that construction method is the seed of the third die. Here the flap of an opened envelope folds upward in the same faceted grammar, so the flap reads as a small white-capped summit. It is the kind of envelope a scholarship decision arrives in, which felt like the right place for the Foundation's geometry to land. The result is a transformation of a visual grammar into a separate image; the actual W, and the wordmark with it, stays off the leather entirely.
Materials carry their share of the meaning. Poppy Red and Country Gray take a blind deboss, the artwork pressed into the leather with heat and pressure alone, so each image lives as shadow and relief and deepens as the tag ages in a pocket or on a handle. Black takes the same dies in a restrained warm gold, for the occasions that ask for a little ceremony. Red and gray are, of course, the colors Western uses to build its own peak, which made the palette an easy decision to defend.
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 Western Colorado University Foundation and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.