Trish Mulloy / YAAZ Inc. / MTM Enterprises × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Trish Mulloy keeps her working life in plain text on a public resume, and it reads better than most brand sites we visit. The listing places her in New Berlin, Wisconsin, doing digital media and marketing under two names, YAAZ Inc. and MTM Enterprises. The years behind that line are the good part. She trained in advertising and graphic arts at Minnesota in the early nineties. The long middle chapter was large-format print, sold across the Midwest, one territory grown past two and a half million in billing. The current chapter is SEO and social campaigns, with dashboards keeping score.
We press marks into leather for a living, so we keep a soft spot for anyone whose career began at a press. Trish spent years making impressions in ink before she started counting them on screens. That felt like family, and we made her a study.
The mark, as found
We went looking for a logo and came back with typography only. The identity lives as one uppercase line on the resume, YAAZ INC/MTM ENTERPRISES, and how the two companies relate to each other is more than we could verify from the outside. So we treated the pair the way the resume treats it, as one line of work with two names, and we set that line exactly as found before proposing anything.
The mark this study proposes borrows from the room Trish started in. Crop marks hold the corners, the kind a trimmer leaves alone until the sheet is approved. Above the name sits a registration target, the small crossed ring pressmen use to prove the plates agree. YAAZ carries the weight and MTM ENTERPRISES holds the base line. In the pressroom that symbol means in register; in her current work it means on target. One mark, both careers.
Pressed
Nothing public hands us a company palette, so the colors here are this study's own choices, taken from the materials of the trade. Gray sand is the press sheet before the ink and blueberry is the blue that working links have worn since the web began. A black tag joins them as the ink itself, and black is the one leather in our line that takes the gold foil.
The same mark rides lower on the toiletry bags, a small maker's mark in the corner where a monogram would normally sit. The stack is blueberry over dark espresso, link blue over pressroom brown. Both stamps are blind deboss, shadow and grain doing all the work.
Press on
Before the cursor there was the manicule, the small pointing hand printers kept in their ornament cases for four centuries. Every index finger hovering over a mouse is its descendant, so we set it in a letterpress rule frame, pointing at two words that hold her whole file. Press was the machine her first trade ran on; a press is also what a thumb gives a button. Pressing on is the third meaning, the quiet one, and it is what a practice does when it crosses from ink to analytics with its client relationships intact.
On the keychains the hand rides where the clicking happens. The black fob carries the words in gold, the finishing foil print shops have always saved for the good jobs. The poppy red fob answers in blind deboss, red having served as the trade's accent ink since rubrics were set by hand.
The journals take the same hand in the corner, pressed larger than a monogram. One is gray sand, pale as an empty page; the other is sangria, a deep wine that suits a senior practice. Campaign plans still begin on paper somewhere, and these are for that somewhere.
Every click began as a press
The catchall tray got the seal. Around its rim runs the sentence we kept arriving at while reading her file: every click began as a press. Inside the ring, halftone dots step from bold down to fine, ink's oldest trick for making tone out of pure black and the closest thing print ever had to a pixel. A registration cross holds the center.
We pressed it into the golden tan of an arizona tray, the piece that ends up by the door holding keys and quarters. The line is ours, coined for her, and we should say so plainly; if it fits, she is welcome to keep it.
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 Trish Mulloy and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.