Chinese tea · three stripes, one lean
Thirty-four Chinese teas set the way a race number is set: two flat colours, italic condensed caps cropped at the edge, and three halftone stripes running through behind the leaf.
34 teas · 7 categories
This is the language of cheap sports printing: two colours, a coarse screen, italic caps that lean because the sheet has to look like it is already moving. It suits tea more than it first appears, because tea is sold by grade and by lot, and a grade wants to be legible from across a room. The stripes are not decoration, they are a baseline: they hold the leaf circle in place on an otherwise empty white field. Only three things are ever on the sheet, so the photograph carries the detail and the type carries the name. The Cyrillic is kept because the transliteration is how these teas were first named to a Russian buyer, and the Chinese origin line stays under it as the correction. Everything else — gradients, drop shadows, second typefaces — was left out on purpose.