A rebrand that did not redraw the logo

For years this organization was called the same thing as one of its frameworks. “Expressive Tea” meant both the people doing the work and a specific decorator-driven framework built on Express — and when that framework entered maintenance, the organization’s public identity was still being carried by the product it had stopped developing.

That is not a logo problem. No amount of redrawing fixes a name that points at two things.

What actually changed

A hierarchy, stated once and applied everywhere:

Expressive Tea Software is the organization. Green Tea and Expressive Tea are frameworks it publishes. Neither is an alternate name for it, and neither speaks for it.

Everything downstream follows from that sentence. Green Tea is the framework where the work happens; Expressive Tea is the original, now in maintenance. Expressive-Tea stays as the GitHub namespace, because a namespace is an address and breaking addresses to tidy up a naming decision costs other people more than it costs us.

The permanent descriptor is Open source, built in Mexico.

The cup was not touched

The mark is the same one it has always been, and that is deliberate rather than lazy. It is not redrawn, recoloured, stretched, or combined with Green Tea’s leaf; nothing is added inside it. The three source files are pinned by SHA-256 in the brand guide, and one of them — et-avatar-transparent.png — is the single composition source. The portable SVG deliverables embed exactly those bytes rather than a re-export, so there is no lineage of slightly different cups to argue about later.

A rebrand is usually an excuse to redraw. This one had a naming problem to solve, and the mark was not the part that was broken.

The palette came out of the cup

The accents were not chosen; they were sampled from the mark’s own pixels, at recorded coordinates, with the exact commands written down so anyone can reproduce them:

• green #00d084
• teal #00a1ba
• blue #0066ff

Supporting colours are graphite #0d1117, white #f8fafc, and two greys for secondary text. Matcha and purple are not in the organization’s palette — those stay exclusive to Green Tea, so a Green Tea page and an organization page never look like the same voice.

Typography is Inter — 700 for the name, 600 for descriptors and metadata, 400 for auxiliary text — with Zen Maru Gothic 700 for “SOFTWARE”. Both are OFL 1.1, the licences ship with the assets, and the deliverables embed the WOFF2 files while keeping the text editable, so a render is identical whether or not the machine has the fonts installed.

What you can see from here

This site. expressive-tea.io is now the organization’s front page rather than a documentation site that happened to sit on the apex — the Expressive Tea documentation moved back to docs.expressive-tea.io, where it belongs, and the old links still work.

The brand system also covers the editorial and video side: fixed canvases, a technical grid, project badges with their own colour pairs, and one rule that turns out to matter more than any of them — one image carries one language. Spanish and English get separate files with -es and -en suffixes rather than a bilingual compromise that reads badly in both.

None of that is visible in a logo. It is the part that makes the next thing we publish look like it came from the same place as the last one.