Indigo on cream, and the leaf inside the wreath

Why every tea is set inside a wreath

A crest is the oldest way to say that something came from a place and was made by somebody. Two flat inks and a heavy paper texture are all this shop uses, so the design has to be built from drawing and arrangement rather than from gradients. Indigo happens to be the one colour that reads well against every class of Chinese tea: it holds the yellow-green of a spring Longjing and it holds the black-and-gold of a Yunnan red without either going muddy. The leaf is always laid out as a circle at the centre, so the wreath frames the actual product and not an illustration of it. Names are arched above and repeated in hanzi below, because a tea from Wuyi or from Xihu has two names and both belong on the label. Mottoes are set small in caps at the foot, the way they sit on printed workwear. Nothing is embossed or shaded — if it would not survive one pass of ink on cloth, it is not in the layout.