Tea printed like a team kit

Why the tea gets a jersey number

The visual language is taken from gym packaging: two saturated flats, type leaning forward, halftone edges and a badge for every line of information. It suits Chinese tea because the sports shelf is where weighed and graded things live, and Chinese tea is also traded by grade, by harvest and by the gram. The number in the box is the position of the tea in the catalogue rather than a claim about anyone's body — nothing here promises what a cup will do to a person. Halftone dots and diagonal bars come from screen printing on jersey cloth, so the same artwork survives being pulled onto fabric without being redrawn. The photograph stays a plain overhead circle in the middle, which keeps the poster about the leaf instead of about the poster. Colour is held to red, blue, black and white, so thirty-four different leaf colours still read as one shelf.