Cha: The Story of Tea
Print • Illustrations • Publication
As a passion project, I wanted to publish a book about tea to connect back to my cultural heritage of tea. As a Chinese American, seeing how tea is prepared in both Eastern and Western ways was fascinating, and I wanted to track how tea changes throughout time and cultures. I published and crafted the hardcover and bound the book to tie it together.
Tea Time
The Story of Tea covers the timeline of tea from its origins in China to its travels to Europe and America, and modern-day customs of consuming tea. The second half of the book explores the types of tea families, Black, Green, Oolong, etc., and the recommended way of brewing these families to their fullest extent. Illustrations help display the way tea is brewed and consumed around the world, and pictures of tea leaves help showcase what good tea leaves look like.
Spilling the Tea
Much of the book discusses how tea was introduced to the region and the ways people have prepared the drink in innovative ways. There’s also footnote information in the margins that help highlight the timeframe of tea. I applied a system for this book, creating a rhythm between the text, the timeline of tea, and the illustrations so that it was easy to understand and digest.
Creating the Cover
Once I created the content, I wanted to create the cover and bind the book myself. The most appropriate cover for a book like this was a very simple buckram cover, and a Chinese/Japanese style binding to connect to the origins of tea itself. The red accent helps tie together the binding, making the folds a prominent feature of the book.
I also created some paper from green tea leave as an inside cover. The cover, otherwise, is a very simplest and minimal cover to not take away from the rest of the book.