Chinese tea · olive drab, stencil, lot code
Thirty-four Chinese teas set out on olive drab as issue sheets: stencil capitals, crosshair targets, dimension boxes, coordinates and a label that says do not remove it.
7 teas · 5 categories
Issue documents describe things by dimension, weight, grade and batch, and they never describe how something feels. That restraint suits tea, where the useful facts are a leaf size in millimetres, a moisture figure, an elevation and a harvest window. Olive drab is chosen for the same reason field kit is: it takes ink badly and photographs honestly, and dark leaf sits on it without a cut-out. The stencil is left open-bridged and slightly worn so the name looks applied to a surface rather than typeset on a screen. Registration targets and scale bars are placed where a printer would place them, at the corners and edges, so the sheet reads as something produced rather than composed. The tea photograph is the only element allowed to be irregular; everything else is boxed, ruled and numbered.