Wonder Travel Studio × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Wonder Travel Studio is a luxury hotel advisory, in its own words “a luxury travel agency for globetrotting families that want to travel with style and purpose.” Our records place it in Denver, Colorado. The founder, Serena McClain, tells her story plainly on the site: she first left the United States at seventeen, and the travel bug bit her. Since then she has walked 500 miles through Spain and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship; she has worked as a barmaid in Edinburgh and changed diapers in Phnom Penh. These days she is a mother of two young boys, “awesome and delicious and fun” by her own account, and she spends her standing with the great hotel houses on other families' behalf.
The name is what called us to the bench. The live wordmark is a thin high-contrast serif, handsome on screen and nervous under a die; leather closes up hairlines the way water closes over a wake. And there in the second position of WONDER sits an O, a round window if ever a travel brand had one, waiting for someone who has crossed an ocean by ship to look through it.
As found
The mark this study proposes
THE PORTHOLE O keeps her name and gives it a hull. WONDER runs in wide-tracked bold capitals of one sturdy, even weight, chosen so the finest line on the die is still a confident one. The O becomes a porthole: a single thick ring, exactly as tall as its neighboring letters and a touch heavier than their strokes, with three gently rolling wave lines filling its lower half and open sky above them. Each wave ends cleanly at the inner edge of the ring, and the outside of the ring stays untouched. Below, TRAVEL STUDIO sits centered in small, widely letterspaced capitals of the same stroke, a third the height of the caps above. We resisted the urge to add rivets around the ring; the circle says ship well enough on its own.
Pressed
Both the as-found type and the porthole mark were pressed lengthwise on a pair of leathers: pale gray-sand, which follows the site's light editorial ground, and warm caramel, which answers the tan warmth running through the identity. Black carries the gold foil, and the porthole takes to foil especially well; a bright ring on black reads like a cabin light at night.
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 Wonder Travel Studio and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.