Heritage, without the pastiche.

A self-initiated identity and e-commerce concept for a fictional Chinese tea house — nineteen screens, a reusable design system and a brand built to feel refined without leaning on visual clichés.

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Role: Brand & digital designer
Type: Self-initiated concept
Scope: Identity · 19 screens Design system
Year: 2026

01 — The Brief

Premium tea online often falls into costume or generic wellness.

Dragons, brush strokes, and jade textures until the brand reads as fancy dress — or strip everything cultural out and it becomes one more minimal wellness shop. The brief was to find the third path.

“Treat tea as agriculture first, luxury second — altitude, picking windows, wok temperature.”

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01Too much costume

Dragons, brush strokes and jade textures until the brand reads as fancy dress.

02Too little identity

Strip everything Chinese out and it becomes one more minimal wellness shop.

03The opportunity

Treat tea as agriculture first, luxury second — altitude, picking windows, wok temperature.

04The output

A full commerce flow, an editorial section that earns authority, and a system a developer can build from.

02 — The rule that shaped everything

No overlays. No gradients. Let the materials do the work.

The hardest of three rules, and the most useful: without the easy tool for putting text on images, every hero became a deliberate hard split.

RULE 01No overlaysText and image never share the same layer. A hard split forces every page to earn its layout.

RULE 02No gradientsFlat fields only. The palette is strong enough to carry contrast without a fade.

RULE 03Gold as accent onlyGold appears as a hairline, a rule or a price. Jade and charcoal carry eighty percent of every page.

03 — The Work

Nineteen screens, one standard.

A complete e-commerce system — homepage through checkout — built on eleven design tokens and zero compromises on the rule.

A Jade Dynasty storefront — **A brand that has to work beyond the browser.**Storefront, packaging and interface all share the same restrained visual language.

Jade Dynasty packaging — **A brand that has to work beyond the browser.**Storefront, packaging and interface all share the same restrained visual language.

04 — Key decisions

The calls that shaped it.

Three hard rules applied consistently from the first artboard to the last. When a rule broke, the page broke — and you could see it immediately.

01Gold is a line, never a field

Gold appears as a hairline, a rule or a price. Jade and charcoal carry roughly eighty percent of every page.

02Vermillion once per screen

Used only on the seal, so it reads as ceremonial punctuation rather than an alert colour.

03Culture through content

Chinese product names beside English and scroll-like vertical rhythm carry the heritage — not ornament.

05 — Type System

THE PRIMARY DISPLAY FACECormorant Garamond

Chosen for its editorial authority and Renaissance roots. In this self-initiated concept, that sense of refinement supported the fictional heritage positioning without pretending the brand had a real historical lineage.

STRUCTURE & SYSTEM BODYGeist Variable

Clean, contemporary, and technically precise. The sans balances the serif and signals a modern commerce system rather than a museum piece.

06 — Reflection

The constraints gave the brand its character.

Three rules held from the first screen to the last made the system feel inevitable. No overlay meant every layout had to be honest about what the image was doing. No gradient meant every colour choice was load-bearing. Gold as accent only meant that every use of it landed.

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