Chinese tea · hazard stripes, quote marks, one tag
The name of the tea, in quotation marks
Hazard stripes at the edges, heavy caps in quotes, an orange zip tie on the leaf. Thirty-four Chinese teas labelled the way a shipment is labelled.
Chinese tea · hazard stripes, quote marks, one tag
Hazard stripes at the edges, heavy caps in quotes, an orange zip tie on the leaf. Thirty-four Chinese teas labelled the way a shipment is labelled.
7 teas · 5 categories
Putting a name in quotation marks says that the word is being quoted rather than claimed, which is exactly the right register for a study that sells nothing. Hazard stripes and crosshairs come from packaging and print production, where every mark tells a handler what to do, and a tea shipment carries the same kind of instruction. The spec block is not styling: origin, altitude, process and lot are the facts a buyer of Chinese tea actually asks for, so they are set in the largest place a caption can occupy. The zip tie is the one three-dimensional object on an otherwise flat sheet, and it stands for the moment a batch is closed and tagged. Warm white rather than pure white keeps the dark leaf from burning out at the edges. Everything else is left empty, because industrial labelling only works when there is space around it.