During the whole process of designing Azteca Tea I was thinking that I wanted to evoke a certain feeling in a consumer of the product. I wanted the product to feel unique and completely different to the modern and minimalist designs that many products seem to have these days, let alone just tea. First and foremost I wanted a name that would be catchy and exotic yet simple and easy to read and understand. In Spanish, the translation of “Aztec tea” is té Azteca (pronounced teh athteca) so to me, calling the product Tea Azteca was a no brainer. However, during the logo design process I found that “Tea Azteca” would not fit into a triangle shape as well as “Azteca Tea” and so the name was changed. As I was creating the logo I created a vectorized golden Aztec pyramid, thinking that it would look great and be an easily recognizble symbol for what the tea represented, and this went on to set the tone for the rest of the packaging. I chose a 3 sided pyramid shaped box to both match the logo and also to try and think outside the box compared to a more conventional tea packaging.

The first flavour I created was Inca Gold. The Incas were masters of gold craft, and because there are things like Nescafe Gold coffee, and Marlboro Gold cigarettes, I figured I’d give my own take on something that would be a ‘gold’ flavour. I created the gold texturing and pattern around the box before choosing black to best contrast it. For added personality I manipulated an image of the Aztec calendar and blended it into every coloured part of the packaging that wasn’t the flavour ‘s image or gold trim. Because the face in the calendar isn’t greatly visible around most of the box I decided that the bottom of the box would be a good place to showcase the calendar in its entirety.

After finishing the Inca Gold packaging I had decided that because the black and gold theme was looking fantastic, that the other flavours needed to have rich but dark colours also. I chose dark blue and dark red mostly because of a personal preference to those colours, but really I could have just as easily used dark purple or green because I believe they too would have looked just as great.

One thing that did not suit the new Aztec flavour however, was the mostly green picture of a warrior guarding a village that was used on the first draft of the Inca Gold box. I then decided that in keeping with the pyramid logo and the shape of the box, that I would use three differently drawn styles of pyramids to represent the flavours. The Inca Gold has an old and worn out pyramid in an overgrown jungle, to match the idea of long lost treasure. Aztec Ayahuasca features a very large and very unrealistic example of an Aztec pyramid because Ayahuasca is a very strong psychedelic drink made from native plants, and I thought that the pyramid looked like something from a dream or a hallucination Finally for the Mayan Magic flavour, I chose a picture of a priestess praying in front

of an old mystic pyramid to reflect the Mayan’s belief in strong magic, as it seemed appropriate.

Overall I am very happy with my designs. I think I executed everything on the packaging very well, however the one thing that I wish I had done was create the three pyramid pictures for each flavour myself. I am more than capable of doing it myself but I was happy to find existing pictures as I

wanted to save as much time as possible to allow myself more time to finish other assignments.