Chinese tea · one drop, lit from inside
The whole tea fits inside one drop
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed inside a single glossy drop, with the brewed colour of each one carried out into the rim and the bubbles around it.
Chinese tea · one drop, lit from inside
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed inside a single glossy drop, with the brewed colour of each one carried out into the rim and the bubbles around it.
3 teas · 3 categories
The drop is the shortest way to say that tea is a liquid before it is a leaf. Each design puts the dry leaf inside the drop and then tints the rim and the surrounding bubbles with the colour that tea actually brews, pale yellow-green for Longjing and deep amber for ripe pu-erh, so the picture carries what a tasting note would have to spell out. The gloss is borrowed on purpose: household liquids have been lit like this for decades, and that light makes an unfamiliar Chinese tea legible to someone who has never bought one. The wordmark is wide and flat so it never argues with the render — it sits under the drop the way a label sits under a bottle. Bubbles are sized in a rough progression instead of scattered evenly, which keeps the eye travelling outward from the leaf. On the light version the ground is left completely empty, because a drop only reads as a drop when there is nothing behind it.