Bronze Packaging Design · 2025
Grandpa Gui Tea Packaging
by Jinxin Liu
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Packaging Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Grandpa Gui
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 12,122
- Verification code 73049340B5 · Verify this award
About Grandpa Gui Tea Packaging
Grandpa Gui is a tea packaging design created for a herbal tea brand. The packaging is made of matte special paper, printed with Pantone colors and finished with embossing. Illustrations of the herbs and flowers contained in the tea are shown on the surface. A light color palette reflects the light character of the product. The structure improves the traditional airplane box and is combined with a traditional Chinese winding form. The winding method keeps production costs low and gives the package a distinct appearance.
Jinxin Liu's Grandpa Gui Tea Packaging emerges within contemporary design discourse that seeks reconciliation between minimalist aesthetics and cultural heritage, representing a sophisticated material response to increasing consumer desire for products that honor tradition while speaking fluent contemporary visual language. The packaging system demonstrates compositional maturity through its chromatic restraint, employing a carefully calibrated palette of desaturated pastels—butter yellow, blush pink, soft peach, pale grey-beige, and dual lavender tones—that suggests both the delicate nature of premium tea itself and the refined sensibilities of mindful consumption culture, each hue differentiated sufficiently to establish variant identity while maintaining family coherence through unified tonal register and analogous temperature relationships. The formal architecture reveals intelligent spatial thinking: rectangular boxes and one cylindrical form arranged in asymmetrical balance that activates negative space and creates dynamic visual interest without sacrificing the serene, contemplative atmosphere appropriate to tea ceremony traditions and wellness product categories. Surface treatment represents particular achievement, with blind-embossed or tone-on-tone printed botanical illustrations—leaves, flowers, stems, and organic forms—creating textural richness through relief and subtle value shifts rather than chromatic contrast, a sophisticated restraint that rewards close inspection and physical handling, transforming packaging interaction into haptic experience that extends brand engagement beyond purely visual encounter. This approach to surface decoration draws upon historical precedents including textile jacquard weaving, letterpress debossing, and traditional paper embossing techniques, translating craft heritage into contemporary industrial production while maintaining the aura of artisanal attention and material quality. Typography demonstrates cultural bridging through the integration of ideographic characters with romanized brand name "GRANDPA GUI," balanced letterforms, generous spacing, and vertical text orientation that references traditional scroll formats while serving contemporary information hierarchy needs, this bilingual approach expanding accessibility while maintaining cultural authenticity and heritage connection. The lighting and photography direction supports the design intention impeccably: soft diffused illumination suggesting north light or professional studio control eliminates distracting specular highlights, while delicate shadow gradients establish spatial recession and volumetric presence, the pure white ground functioning both as physical support and conceptual void that isolates objects for maximum formal clarity and flexible media application. Material specification appears carefully considered, with matte paperboard surfaces suggesting substantial weight and natural fiber content that align with sustainability values and premium quality expectations, the absence of glossy coatings or metallized finishes reinforcing organic positioning and understated luxury coding appropriate to wellness and lifestyle categories. The work seems to explore how packaging might function beyond mere product protection and brand identification to become ceremonial object, gift-worthy artifact, and post-consumption keepsake, addressing the entire product lifecycle and suggesting reuse potential that extends value beyond initial transaction. One observes here the careful negotiation between competing demands: cultural specificity and international legibility, traditional reverence and contemporary relevance, visual impact and restrained elegance, premium positioning and inclusive accessibility, environmental responsibility and production viability, family coherence and variant differentiation, immediate shelf presence and sustained appeal, functional performance and aesthetic experience. The botanical motifs invite consideration of the natural origins of tea, the agricultural knowledge embodied in cultivation traditions, the seasonal rhythms of harvest, and the transformation of leaf to beverage through human craft and cultural practice, connecting contemporary consumers to deep historical continuities and ecological relationships often obscured in modern commercial contexts. How might this design approach, with its emphasis on material honesty, cultural respect, aesthetic restraint, and ceremonial potential, suggest pathways toward more meaningful relationships between people and the everyday objects that populate their lives, transforming routine consumption into opportunities for mindfulness, cultural connection, and appreciation of beauty integrated with function?
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This tea packaging focuses on promoting body lightness and beauty, aiming to give consumers a direct sense of lightness through its design. We illustrated the herbs and flowers contained in the tea on the packaging and used a traditional winding method, which not only highlights the product's uniqueness but also keeps packaging costs low. In terms of color, we chose a light palette to reflect the product's characteristics.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Width 270 mm x Depth 100 mm x Height 95 mm
- Tags
- Packaging, Tea, Chinese Culture, Women, Herbs
- Production Technology
- The packaging utilizes matte special paper, with the pattern featuring Pantone colors and embossing techniques, which render the design exquisite and textured. Complemented by the airplane box structure and the winding form, the entire packaging exudes a sense of lightness and cultural sophistication.
- Design Challenge
- The biggest challenge in the project was to express Chinese tea culture through packaging and showcase the product's slimming and beautifying features. We consulted numerous ancient Chinese texts, found the winding packaging form, and addressed the issue by illustrating herbs and using light colors.
- Project Duration
- The project started in December 2023 in Nanning and finished in August 2024 in Nanning.
- Operation Flow
- This packaging has been improved upon the traditional airplane box structure and enhanced with a winding form, making the entire package more innovative and unique.
- Research
- This project enhances sales by improving product packaging to attract consumers. The goal is to showcase Eastern tea culture and convey a light, healthy feeling through design. Market research and customer interviews were used to create eco-friendly, light-colored packaging. The design improves the sensory experience, differentiates the product in the market, and strengthens the brand. It reduces costs, boosts appeal, and supports sustainability with recyclable materials and reduced printing.
- Inspiration
- This is a tea packaging that focuses on lightness and beautifying effects. The client wishes to present the visual essence of Eastern tea culture. To convey this, we used traditional Chinese winding techniques, illustrated flowers and herbs related to herbal tea, and incorporated light colors in the packaging.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Simin Wang, Jinxin Liu
Image #2: Photographer Simin Wang, Jinxin Liu
Image #3: Photographer Simin Wang, Jinxin Liu
Image #4: Photographer Simin Wang, Jinxin Liu
Image #5: Photographer Simin Wang, Jinxin Liu
Colors of Grandpa Gui Tea Packaging
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