Chinese tea · measured and annotated
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed flat on paper, measured in millimetres and annotated with hairline leader lines. The sheet explains the leaf and nothing else competes with it.
7 teas · 5 categories
The layout comes from a specimen sheet rather than from an advertisement. One object sits in the middle of a pale page and everything around it is a note about that object: origin, process, form, age, width in millimetres. The leader lines are hairlines and they touch the leaf exactly where the note applies, so a reader can check each claim against the photograph instead of trusting it. Chinese tea is already traded this way — by grade, by harvest, by the shape of the dry leaf — so the annotation is not a costume, it is the same information a buyer asks for out loud. The colour strip along the bottom is sampled off the leaf itself rather than chosen, which keeps the palette honest as the tea changes from sheet to sheet. Registration crosses and bilingual captions belong to print production, and they let the page stay quiet while the leaf carries the page.