A style study — not a real store, not affiliated with Otl Aicher · more
Draft — 3 of 34 teas designed in this style. Ask us to finish it
Aicher grid tea signage

Chinese tea · grid, arcs, pictograms

Lowercase, on a grid, with a pictogram for the rest

Thirty-four Chinese teas run as a signage system: a square grid with diagonals, concentric arcs of flat colour, one stroke weight of pictograms and no capital letters.

A round heap of golden-bud ripe pu-erh on a warm off-white grid, with concentric orange, yellow and blue arcs cropped at the corner and white teapot pictograms on a grey block

Seven categories, seven pictograms

3 teas · 3 categories

Why this shop behaves like signage

This is a system before it is a shop: one grid, one type size structure, one stroke weight for every drawing, and colour used as a code rather than as decoration. Lowercase throughout keeps the tone level, so a name like Longjing is announced no louder than the words under it. The pictograms carry the instructions a caption would otherwise have to spell out — pot, lidded bowl, steam, a scoop tipping leaf into a cup — and they hold for every tea in the set. The arcs are the only expressive element, and each family gets its own band, which is how a visitor learns where they are without reading. Chinese tea needs exactly that kind of wayfinding: seven categories, thirty-four names, four scripts, and a newcomer who cannot yet tell a white bud from a green one. Cutting the leaf out on the grid puts the photograph inside the system instead of underneath it. Nothing is styled, and nothing is shouted; the page just directs.