Today, I printed out a tea menu I designed for Curry Temple. Why start out with the tea list? It’s a great way to see information hierarchy with the typography at work. I have the name of the tea, the brand and the description in different treatments as well as an icon for looseleaf tea.

I recently moved and joined tea collections with a friend of mine, so now we have all these teas between us and I wanted to be able to have a quick reference for guests as to what teas we have. I took photographs of all the tea’s packagings and used the descriptions they came with to describe them. In the future, perhaps, I’ll have a survey day where I put the flavors in my own words, though I’m not sure how appetizing that would be. When describing tastes, like coffee or wine, I get really literal, like hot cheap plastic bags on train tracks, when the customers really want to hear “light and earthy.” The looseleaf icon can also indicate when a tea is not available, say the tea strainer is dirty and we’re all too lazy. I printed this on “Canary” colored paper at a print shop down the street. It was nice to have a design project that I would interact with on a weekly basis, instead of something I would ship out and never use/see again.

Oh yes. I designed this logo. I was inspired by heat of curry, pagodas, spices and herbs, the way cilantro stems curve. The main font I used is the delicious Sakkal Majalla. This is my first draft of this menu. I’m already starting to see some spacing I need to change.