Chinese tea · drawn as a type specimen
One letter, annotated like a drawing
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid out on cream specimen sheets: a single Cyrillic glyph at page height, one red stroke inside it, and the leaf photographed into the counters.
Chinese tea · drawn as a type specimen
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid out on cream specimen sheets: a single Cyrillic glyph at page height, one red stroke inside it, and the leaf photographed into the counters.
34 teas · 7 categories
The letter comes first here and the tea is photographed to fit around it. Every page is built like a specimen sheet: one glyph at full height, construction lines through it, and notes in the margin naming what the drawing does — x-height, open terminals, optical balance. Cyrillic leads, pinyin follows, hanzi closes the line, so three scripts sit at the same weight instead of one translating the others. The palette stops at a cream sheet, black ink and a single red, which is all a specimen sheet ever needed. Chinese tea takes this well because its own language is already technical: bud count, altitude, harvest window, grade — all of it wants a caption rather than a slogan. Setting the leaf against a drawn letter also shows its scale honestly, buckwheat granules reading as gravel and silver needles as brush hairs. Nothing is dressed to look expensive; the sheet only labels what is in front of it.