Chinese tea · lock-up, grid, palette bar
Every tea gets its own lock-up
Thirty-four Chinese teas treated as thirty-four identities — a circular lock-up over the leaf, a construction grid behind it, and a named palette across the bottom of the page.
Chinese tea · lock-up, grid, palette bar
Thirty-four Chinese teas treated as thirty-four identities — a circular lock-up over the leaf, a construction grid behind it, and a named palette across the bottom of the page.
3 teas · 3 categories
A standards manual shows its own scaffolding — the grid, the registration marks, the palette with the hex written out — and that candour is the point of the shop. Chinese tea is already organised this way in the places it comes from: a protected name, a defined county, a grade, a fixed processing route. Giving each tea a lock-up is not dressing it up, it is drawing the structure that already exists around the name. The lock-up sits directly on the leaf rather than beside it so the mark can never be separated from the material it describes, and the ring is a keyline rather than a filled disc so the tea keeps showing through. The palette is taken out of the photographs — mahogany, ink black, ochre — and only the red is imported, working as the seal and nothing else. Keywords under each swatch stay to three words because a colour that needs a paragraph is not doing its job. The pared-back pages are the same system with the scaffolding switched off.