Windrose Expeditions × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Windrose Expeditions says who it is in a single unhurried line: “Windrose Expeditions is a full service travel agency specializing in adventure travel and luxury hotels.” Our master record places the desk in Warren, Rhode Island, a river town that has seen its share of departures. The name gives the sensibility away. A windrose is the old chart device that tells a navigator where the winds come from, and an agency that reaches for it is promising, before any particular destination, that you will know where you stand.
The study earned its keep when we read the homepage source. Their stylesheet keeps every letter transparent while the webfonts arrive – 0%, 99% { color: transparent; } – holding the page wordless for up to three seconds so the words come in wearing their own typeface. We recognize the patience; a die maker holds the brass back for the same reason. Their mark is a compass rose over a lowercase wordmark, drawn in white for dark photography, so before pressing we inverted it and walked every point of the rose through the change from screen light to stamped shadow.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
Blueberry follows the deep navy of their travel pages, and gray-sand follows the pale ground their editorial type sits on. Black is the automatic third, and it carries the gold foil.
The rose that knows north
The pun in the name wanted a flower. THE ROSE THAT KNOWS NORTH stands a single long-stemmed rose in a square frame, leaning gently as if in a breeze, and where the bloom opens there is an eight-point compass rose with a capital N floating above its tallest point. Three short dashes of wind press in from the upper left, and the company name sits beneath the stem in plain capitals. Two small leaves ride the stem, one a little lower than the other; we went back and forth on whether the wind dashes crowded the bloom, and in the end we left them.
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 Windrose Expeditions and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.