Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center is South Florida's only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, and the person who made us want to press leather for it is Dr. Erin Kobetz, its associate director for community outreach and engagement. "We are taking Sylvester to the streets," she says of the Game Changer program. She means it in the plainest sense. Since 2018 its vehicles have carried free screening and education into neighborhoods across four South Florida counties, meeting people in the languages they actually speak, and in 2025 the teams reached more than 47,000 South Floridians.
What stays with us is how the routes get chosen. A mapping platform called SCAN 360 shows where cancer burden runs higher than it should, community partners supply what the map leaves out, and the route is decided together. Dr. Kobetz calls this participatory action research. It began with her asking why women of Haitian descent in Miami were dying from cervical cancer, a treatable disease, and it grew from there into years of partnership. A study in pressed leather is a small thing next to that. What it can offer is the shape of the work, a map that turns into a street.
The mark, as found
The official lockup is wide and disciplined. The split orange-and-green University of Miami U sits at the left of a large green serif SYLVESTER, with the health-system line held beneath a thin rule. At roughly three times wider than tall, it asked to run lengthwise, so on the tags it does.
Pressed
We pressed the full lockup along lengthwise luggage tags in the mark's own registers. Deep forest green holds the wordmark's territory while golden tan answers the orange half of the U. A third tag in pale warm greige stands in for the white field the logo has always lived on. Every press in this study is a blind deboss, tone on tone.
To the streets
The first companion design follows one route off the map. Its upper band is a fine city grid with a few blocks shaded solid, the way an analytics map flags a neighborhood carrying more than its share. From a marked point, a bold line drops out of the grid and lands in the same place at street level, among storefront awnings and royal palms, where an open canopy waits at the curb. The route ends in a star at the canopy's threshold, under the words TO THE STREETS.
On the catchall tray the scene takes the whole golden tan field of the arizona leather, pressed deep. A tray sits by the door where keys and badges land at the end of a field day, which felt right for a design about going out and coming back.
The journal pair carries the same scene at the lower right of the front panel, at a generous size. One journal is deep forest green and the other pale warm greige, the mark's green and its white ground restated. These are working notebooks, the kind that ride along and hold questions written down in the rooms where they were asked.
The meeting point
The second design is a small wordless roundel for the things that travel in pockets. A solid line enters the circle from one side and jogs at right angles, the way a van follows streets. A dotted path curves in from the other. They end together at one center point, and thin rings spread outward from the meeting. Four small diamonds sit on the outer ring, one for each county the vehicles cover. We wanted participatory research drawn as plainly as we could manage; whether a coin-sized pressing can say all that, we admit, depends on the hand that holds it.
The keychain duo splits the university's U across two fobs, one deep forest green and one golden tan.
On the toiletry bags the roundel becomes a maker's mark, small in the lower right corner of each front. The stack pairs golden tan over deep espresso brown, blind debossed on both. Outreach is early mornings and long drives; a dopp kit is honest equipment for that work.
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 Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.