Chinese tea · desert print, melting caps
Thirty-four Chinese teas printed as tour merch — arched melting caps, a desert horizon, and ripples of heat drawn outward from the pile in ochre, rust and cream.
8 teas · 5 categories
Tour merch has one job — to be read across a crowd — so everything here is built at that distance: three ink colours, arched words top and bottom, and a single object dead centre. The drips are not decoration, they are how the letters carry heat; the same heat comes back as concentric ripples around the leaf, so the type and the photograph are describing one temperature. Ochre, rust and cream came out of the tea itself, and dark teas take the palette without any correction: ripe pu-erh paste is already lacquer-black with amber edges, and roasted rock oolong is already the colour of a sunset horizon. The grain is kept coarse because a screen print on cotton loses fine detail anyway, and pretending otherwise makes the design look like a photograph of a design. The small melted smiley is the one soft thing in the frame, and it holds the corner that would otherwise want a logo. On white paper the print becomes the retail version and the tea name takes the arch, which is the only edit that matters.