Gu Yue

Gu Yue 古月

Role

• Head Designer

• Brand developer

• Head Creative Direction

Toolkit

• Adobe Illustrator

• Figma

• Framer

• Adobe Photoshop

• Adobe Lightroom

Summary:

UX & Cognitive Engineering: Designed the full website architecture, utilizing cognitive flow charts to optimize the user journey and ensure a seamless digital experience. Surveyed a small group of users on what they wanted to see in the website, and the flow/order in which they would like to interact with the web design

Creative Direction: Conducted all product photography, capturing the brand’s "elevated" vibe to drive visual storytelling across platforms.

Strategic Growth: Provided a roadmap for future expansion, identifying opportunities to scale the brand's physical and digital presence.

Introduction

Gu Yue is an up and coming tea brand that bridges the gap in traditional chinese tea in the United States. Gu Yue aims to spread Chinese traditions and share the simplistic beauty that is Gong Fu Cha.

For Gu Yue, an emerging tea and cafe brand, I executed a comprehensive brand transformation that marries traditional Chinese culture with a modern, elevated luxury aesthetic. My approach centered on simplicity and cultural storytelling, ensuring every touchpoint reflected a premium experience.

Problem

Gu Yue, as a new brand, lacked brand identity and direction as to how they would launch their initual collection. With this in mind, we started from scratch, and I developed a cohesive visual system and branding that highlights heritage through a minimalist, luxury lens, picking fonts and colors that are crucial to Chinese culture while simultaneously being chic and modern.

Content Strategy

I started with mapping out the cognitive flow of the project and developing a brand deck to keep in sight where the brand was going to head in terms of creative direction. After that was solidified and approved, I shot the images of all of their products and started with my low fidelity prototyping.

Low Fidelity Prototype

Lead with simplicity and elegance

This was our approach going into further developing the brand identity

With all of this in mind, we integrated additional features for future development and that was through surveying a small group of participants that explained what they looked for in terms of a "luxury" browsing experience. Those things include:

• drink menu additions

• locations

• information about product sourcing

Final Product

Conclusion

This project was done with a tight time line in mind. From development to end, it took about three months. It is still in the final stages of deployment, as inventory is being sorted. However, this was the first project I had true creative freedom over, and that will remain something truly special in my repetoire.