Tea House

• I made a logo for a made-up company “Tea House” to engage the audience with this simple image to show the leisure and relaxing environment of the tea house.
• Background information:
  • Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to China and other East Asian countries. After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world.
  • The tea plant originated in the region encompassing today’s Southwest China, Tibet, north Myanmar, and Northeast India, where it was used as a medicinal drink by various ethnic groups.
  • A teahouse (mainly Asia) or tearoom (also tea room) is an establishment that primarily serves tea and other light refreshments. A tea room may be a room set aside in a hotel especially for serving afternoon tea, or maybe an establishment that only serves cream teas. Although the function of a tearoom may vary according to the circumstance or country, teahouses often serve as centers of social interaction, like coffeehouses.
• Tea House: 
  • tea house in the past: mainly old people
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  • modern tea house: more and more young people relax here
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• Audience
  • Who is the target audience of the product or service (age, genders, income, interests, etc etc)?
    • Mainly elderlies in Chinese with high income have the pleasure to enjoy tea.
    • Also, some young people in Asia are starting to get interested in tea now.
  • What 3 keywords would the client use to describe their product/service?
    • relaxing, welcoming, simple
• Logo Concept:
  • to create a simple logo with a combination of tea and house that people can feel the relaxing and leisure of a tea house and be willing to go in.
• Padlet and ideas:

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• brainstorm practices:
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• Detailed development drawings (paper, iPad):
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  • After a few tries of the tea logo, I decided it’s easier to make a tea house logo because I can combine different elements. So I chose the last one to develop. It is a combination of a teabag and a house inside it. The string on the house is the string on the teabag and I wanted to show the imagery of hanging house as a teabag.

• Process & Feedbacks

1. Mr. Griffin advised me to keep the logo black and white first and try different versions with the shadows. Also, I should look for more typography to see which one best fits.
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   • I tried several different fonts like listing them together. And I also tried the different combinations with the black and white lines. For example, the black tea bag and the white house or the converse.
2. Then, I revised the lines on myself to make it more simple and beautiful
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3. I asked Nan if there’s any place to improve and she advised me to make the shape rounder without the sharp edge on the top.
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4. I put the pogo on the mockup bag, but it turned out weird because I used the white color on top of the black so it is not transparent.
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   • there left an ugly white shape
   • I tried myself and asked Mr. Griffin for help and finally it with expanding the strokes.
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   • the transparent shape looks much better
5. I was inspired by the logo Mr. Griffin showed so I made another version of it:
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• draft:
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• final logo:
  1. teahouse_1 
  2. teahouse_2
•  mockups:
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• poster
• reflection:
  • What creative decisions did you take and why?
    • As I went through the information on tea, I realized that teabag is an essential symbol of tea. So I began to try representing tea using a teabag.
  • Which design elements and principles have you emphasized and how does this make your logo effective?
    • I emphasized negative space by shaping out a house inside a teabag. This made my logo more interesting as it communicated with two important elements of the tea house.
  • What did you do well in this project?
    • I really like how I used a string to hang the house just like hanging a teabag in the cup for a cup of tea. In this way, I combined the feature of a teabag with the house.
  • What would you improve/do differently next time and why?
    • Maybe I can come up with more versions of the logo?