Black ink, uneven dots, one red heart

Why the dots are not round

Every mark here is made by hand and left uncorrected: the dots vary in size, the heart wobbles, the lettering bends where a wrist bends. That is the argument of the layout — an object photographed with precision looks more alive when the graphics around it refuse to be precise. Chinese tea takes it well, because the dry leaf is never uniform either, and flat black ink on pale paper shows a twisted red-tea strand or a pressed cube more clearly than any gradient could. Only one colour joins the black, and it is spent once per sheet so the eye has a single place to land. The leaf is cut out instead of staged in a scene, which keeps the paper as paper and stops the design from pretending to be a photograph of a shop. Type is set large and close to the tea, so the name and the leaf are read in the same glance.