I took this quiet Saturday afternoon to finish up a project that has been in progress for months - organizing my spice collection.  I found a set of nice little tins at Ikea a while back that fit nicely into my spice drawer, replacing the hodgepodge of spice bottles, tins, and baggies.  Now I have a "standard" spice container for all my most commonly used spices.

But as I know from my day job, with standards comes homogeneity.  That diversity made it easy to quickly find a particular spice based on the shape and color of the container, and often of the color of the contents.  My tins aren’t transparent, so there is no visual clue as to their contents.  Naturally, I printed out some labels, so I wouldn’t have to open each tin every time I was looking for a particular spice, but each label varied only in the text.  You’d still have to read through a lot of labels to find what you are looking for.  I found myself relying more on the patterns of stains and peeling corners than the text on the label itself!

I thought this was an interesting design concept:  Each tin has all the right design points for it’s appointed task: the size and volume are just right, the wide mouth is works for scooping, pinching, or sprinkling, the surface matches the stainless elsewhere in the kitchen, and the surface is easy to clean.  But when that good design is repeated over and over, something happens. The repetition of an appropriate form might exhibit some qualities that aren’t that appropriate.  Amount is a design quantity that needs to be considered.

That reminds me of a statement by Robert Irwin about the components of color.  Desktop publishers are used to Hue, Saturation, and Brightness as sufficient to define all the possible colors.  Irwin added a surprising forth component - Amount.  While HSV is sufficient to determine an individual color, the amount of each color in relation to others has a profound effect on how one perceives those colors.

The traditional solution to the Amount problem in a set of spice containers is transparency.  Each container automatically takes on some of the diversity of it’s contents.  Not having this "automatic" option, I had to craft an artificial mechanism for diversity.  I based the solution on the diversity of spices by making new color labels which include a photograph of each spice.  At a glance you can differentiate the various spices by color, upon closer inspection you can differentiate shapes, and if that fails for similar spices (like ground thyme and ground oregano), you can fall back to the text label.

Taking all those pictures, cleaning them up in Adobe Photoshop, adding the circular text in Microsoft Publisher, printing, cutting, and affixing each label, was a rather time-consuming effort, multiplied by 50 tins.  Perfect for a lazy afternoon.  But now it’s time to go cook Christmas Eve dinner, spices standing ready, each with its own character despite the regimented rows.