ChaTea Teahouse
Brand design
Project Overview
The goal of this project was to develop a branding system that does not rely on being expressed through an ideogram logo. Typography should be able to stand for the brand by itself on top of other visual elements. Other than focusing on type, one thing we were also required to do is to make our branding logo flexible. It should be able to adapt to different mediums and platforms while still being able to communicate the brand image and message. Being a great lover of tea, I decided that my conceptual brand will be a teahouse that combines both western and eastern tea culture.
Ideation Phase
SKETCH IDEATION AND MOODBOARD
I wanted to embrace the concept of east meets west, but I also wanted to avoid my logo to have a Chinese-take-out restaurant look. I wanted there to be a harmony of English and Asian typography, so I made sure to avoid that one did not overpower the other. I referenced Western and Eastern tea brands and other branding pieces to look for this middle ground.
Final Brand Guideline
For the final branding systems, I decided to combine two of my ideas. Since the name of my brand "ChaTea" is a play on the words "chatty," I kept the idea of using speech bubbles to express different moods and indicate the type of tea. I was also able to incorporate the Chinese word for tea "茶," into the logo by strategically placing two tea leaves to mimic the strokes of these characters. Since I have four variations, I also established the brand to have four colors and illustrations for packaging and other situations with a text logo is not desirable.
Promotional Animation
After finalizing the brand guideline, the next important step was to show how the flexible branding system will function in motion. I created an animation to be used either as a video for social media promotion (ex.instagram) or used as openings/endings for advertisements.
