Chinese tea · thin caps, hairline gold
Wide caps, a gold hairline, nothing else
Thirty-four Chinese teas on quilted ivory: the name letterspaced across the top in thin caps, the leaf centred underneath, one camellia drawn in outline.
Chinese tea · thin caps, hairline gold
Thirty-four Chinese teas on quilted ivory: the name letterspaced across the top in thin caps, the leaf centred underneath, one camellia drawn in outline.
3 teas · 3 categories
Everything here is centred and almost everything is removed. The page holds four things: a quilted ground you can barely see, a hairline gold frame, a name in thin caps opened up until it reads as a rhythm rather than a word, and the leaf. Letterspacing that wide slows reading down, which is the point when the subject is a tea you are meant to look at before you buy it. The camellia in the corner is drawn rather than photographed, and it is the honest emblem for this shelf, since every tea on it comes from Camellia sinensis. Black and ivory with one line of gold means the only colour on the page belongs to the tea itself, so a golden-bud pu-erh and a pan-fired Longjing cannot be confused. Chinese tea suits this restraint because grade is visible in the leaf, and a photograph lit flat on white shows it without help. The quilting is the only texture allowed, and it stays under everything like a pressed cloth.