Bardo Tea

A tea shop approached me to develop their brand identity, including logo, labels, and business cards. The shop would be called Bardo.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is the transitional state between death and rebirth, the gap between one life and the next. Bringing in the related concept of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, the label and logo had to have a circular foundation.

To distill a life cycle down to something immediately legible, I mapped it to a clock face. Bardo begins at midnight and ends somewhere before dawn, occupying the liminal hours between the close of one day and the start of the next. That constraint gave the wordmark its placement.