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Reimagining the identity of a premium tea leaf brand

Aroma Tea House

Timeline

September - November 2021

Role

Graphic Designer

Team

Innovative Design at USC

I worked as part of the Design Team at Innovative Design, USC's premier creative agency club, to reimagine the brand identity, from strategy to final deliverables, for Aroma Tea House,

a Hong-Kong and Vancouver-based fine tea brand.

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Overview

Aroma Tea House is an authentic tea shop founded in Hong Kong in 1955 and is now based in Vancouver. They are looking for a fresh, modern brand identity that would consist of a new

monogram logo, branding guide, social media templates & product packaging recommendations.

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Original Logo

Defining the Problem

Challenges

Aroma Tea House came to our team with the following concerns:

Lack of brand definition

and recognition

Aroma Tea House aimed to penetrate into the North American consumer base, aspiring to become a classic tea brand with premium quality products that would be down-to-earth for daily enjoyment and consumption.

Creating a brand persona that

evokes high quality products

The client wanted the brand aesthetic

to be natural, with understated regality, neutral bamboo tones, as well as black and dark green accents.

Objectives

To address the above needs, our team set out with the following objectives:

Defined Branding

Establish a defined branding that would represent Aroma Tea House as a classic brand whose tea products are great for gifts (presentable and elegant) and easily enjoyable for all

Versatile Logo

Design a logo that is versatile

(e.g. standalone, with full text name, monogrammable) and easily presentable

(applied to social media templates

and product packaging)

Ideation

Low Fidelity 

My team and I began with compiling moodboards for the visual brand identity

and working on initial sketches, primarily experimenting with the different ways (monogram, stamp etc.)

to illustrate the Chinese character (馥) of the Aroma Tea House logo.

During this stage, we worked separately on individual sketches. Presented below is my work.

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Mid Fidelity (Digital Drafts)

After presenting our sketches and receiving feedback, my team began refining and

narrowing down ideas, and advancing our designs to the digital stage.

 

The client was looking for more variations of the logoand in particular, wanted to see how

the logo would look like as a stamp, which is what I focused on experimenting with on top

of the monogram logos that I had presented previously.

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My work

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Logos by my teammates,

Andy and Jamie

High Fidelity

The client preferred a handwritten feel to the Chinese character (馥), and was looking for a

complementary English typeface that would be more neutral and universal.

Presented below are the three logos submitted for the client to select a final logo from.

Logo 1.png

Logo #1

(Mine)

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Logo #2

(by Jamie)

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Logo #3

(by Andy)

Final Deliverables

The Final Logo & Applications

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The client selected my design as the final logo for its ability to represent

the premium, yet modern and approachable brand identity that they sought to build.

The six color variations correspond to Aroma Tea House's

six tea categories: green, white, oolong, red, black and floral tea.
 

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Social Media Templates

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Initial Drafts

Mine

Jamie

Andy

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Brand Guide

In addition to the logo redesign, we developed

Instagram templates for Aroma Tea House,

to help them establish a stronger online presence.

The objectives were to create a cleaner,

more unified visual identity while better promoting

their products by directing users to the online shop.

Instagram: Before

Final Templates

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Key Takeaways

Bilingual Branding

A logo is the soul of a brand. It should effectively

tell a brand story while distinguishing it from competitors. Creating a bilingual logo was an

added challenge that pushed me to design for different audiences and communicate visually across cultural and language borders.

Revisiting the Brand Story

Countless times throughout this project,

I found myself running into a designer's block.

To overcome this, I would frequently revisit our

initial objectives so that I would not lose sight 

of the brand story and personality

that we set out to craft for Aroma Tea House.

Meet My Team!

(we were featured on Innovative Design's Instagram!)

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Problem
Ideation
Final Deliverables
Key Takeaways

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