Tentacles & Tea is a business owned by Nicole, a wellbeing enthusiast that spent her career at Google managing wellbeing experiences for executive women leaders. She decided to expand her experiences and mission to a wider audience. Tentacles and Tea is meant to inspire curiosity, and to pair with the essence of the retreat's content. From goat yoga, to tea parties and, group gingerbread house building workshops- all centered around the mission of resilience, increasing happiness and overall well being. 

A key visual tenant was the use of highly intricate whimsical Victorian illustrations, and how to balance those illustrations with a variety of content. With such a breadth of illustrative needs, I started with creating logo lockups that could contrast with what could be visually overwhelming details. I took inspiration from layered decorative vintage tea tins, and hand-illustrated several variations of the logo for different needs: either on its own, a symbol for small spaces, and a contrasted black label for use when layering on top of additional illustrations. The additional illustrations were organized into sets to keep the usage focused: evergreen illustration patterns, spring/summer illustrations, fall illustrations and winter illustrations, giving the brand some seasonal flexibility and a strong evergreen presence. 

The color scheme played a pivotal role in how the illustrations and branding harmonized, especially in highly interactive mediums. I focused on using a minimal color scheme of a grounded slate blue and cream white that is reminiscent of a tea set. The goal was to tone down the potentially visually overwhelming illustrations, and setting the logo in a higher contrast matte black and cream white to draw focus where needed. 

On the website, we focused on giving room to breath throughout the site, and only using low contrast in the illustrations to keep the visual decoration to a minimum. In key areas of necessary high engagement we introduced higher contrast photography to draw the user to those sections specifically.