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Frolov shapes study

Chinese tea · circles and wedges

everything drawn from one circle

Flat vector, gradient bowls, leaves assembled from half-circles and wedges. A bright system in which every class of tea has its own colour and shape.

Flat vector bowl in a pink to orange gradient filled with tea clumps made of black circles and wedges, with coloured steam curls above

Seven categories, seven shapes

34 teas · 7 categories

Green teaGreen tea5 teasOolongOolong14 teasRed tea (hongcha)Red tea (hongcha)6 teasPu-erhPu-erh4 teasWhite teaWhite tea2 teasTea paste (chagao)Tea paste (chagao)2 teasBuckwheat (not a tea)Buckwheat (not a tea)1 tea

Wear the shapes

All tees and hoodies →

Wear — Ālǐshān Zhū Lù CháĀlǐshān Zhū Lù CháWear — Bái JiānBái JiānWear — Passion-Fruit OolongPassion-Fruit OolongWear — Raw Pu-erh PasteRaw Pu-erh PasteWear — Ripe Pu-erh PasteRipe Pu-erh PasteWear — Dà Hóng PáoDà Hóng Páo

Why it looks like this

Oleg Frolov builds icons from a tiny set of primitives, circle, half-circle and wedge, and that restraint is what keeps them readable at any size. Tea takes to it easily: a clump of pressed leaf really is a pile of rounded forms, so we draw it from those forms instead of tracing a photograph. Colour does the sorting, one hue per class, and the row of dots at the foot of the page is the key rather than an ornament. The bowls keep a warm gradient on purpose, because pure geometry reads cold and tea is not a cold product. The drawings are ours, made after his method rather than with him.