Tell-Tale Teabag Cafe Design
The Tell-Tale Teabag is a fictional literature-based cafe design. With recipes from classic stories and teas based on their authors, this cafe is all about the little details. For this project, I designed a website map, a food menu, a tea menu, and merchandise (including t-shirts, a sticker book, notebooks and more)
The story behind the design of this shop is a reference to two Edgar Allen Poe stories of the "Telltale Heart", and "The Raven", two of which are staples in a dark academia library. The aesthetic of this brand is based on the classics on by own bookshelf, which range from the Iliad and the Oddesey to Jane Austen , Edgar Allen Poe, Louise May Alcott, the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and more. This shop both embraces the love of classical fiction and isn't afraid to make fun of it a little bit.
Menus
The menus at the Tell-tale Teabag are pictured above, with foods from our favorite classics, and menu covers of books that would be sold in the store. As almost any book lover will tell you "Don't judge a book by its cover" applies to almost everything except for books.
Tea Menu
The tea sold in the Tell-Tale Teabag will have a line of literary teas based on the authors, which I think would be a great addition to the cafe for sale.
The Teatime Special would be an event once or twice a month on Sundays that would be orchestrated like a formal tea in the Regency, Victorian, or Mid-Century eras. (Detailed on the Website) This tea would include finger sandwiches, pastries, and traditional tea flavors of the period.
The fonts
I came across in interesting problem as I started bringing this project together, and that was that I wanted the font choices both to reference the periods that these books were from, to be eclectic, and most importantly: to be legible. My final decision was a maximalist mix of handwritten, typewriter, a stamp, and a sans serif fonts. I leaned into using the sans serif for body copy, as we typically see sans serif (grotesque fonts, as they used to be called) used nowadays in printed versions of our favorite classics, and reserved the typewriter and handwritten fonts for headers and titles. The stamp was used primarily to reflect textures in the logo and merchandise designs.
Wearable Merchandise
Some of these concepts I explored more thoroughly in a screenprinting class in my last semester of college. Below are some of the designs that I printed myself along with concepts for additional wearable merchandise in the form of sweatshirts, baseball tees, and aprons for staff.
A sleeve print pictured on the left, and on the right: myself, covered in ink, holding the first t-shirt, just printed. I made a few interesting projects with this class, also featured on this website! See more by clicking the button down below:
Sticker Set/Book
I designed this sticker book of ingredients to be used as labels in your kitchen, or to be placed on notebooks, laptops, phone cases. These have a minimalistic color palette but each one is in the detail rich style of pen and ink illustrations in regency and victorian novels and cookbooks.
Notebooks
This is a pattern design of the Tell-tale raven mascot (who is a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's story titled "The Raven") and its teabag, along with some greenery in the form of succulents, which I imagine would be a common decor item in the shop, as it requires minimal watering, and lends to the cafe's earthy aesthetic.