Labeling a kit
On this page11
The problem
A spice kit or a supplement set is six to ten identical small containers. They get used in low light, by cold hands, often by somebody who did not pack them.
Color alone does not work
Around one in twelve men has a color vision deficiency, and six caps that differ only by shade are six identical caps to them. In a group of four hikers that is likely rather than unlikely.
So pair color with something else
A letter, a number, a word, a notch or a different cap shape. The color can stay as the fast signal; it just cannot be the only one.
Which also solves the dusk problem
At last light every color is grey. A legible word survives conditions that a color code does not, and the word costs nothing.
Write it on the body, not the cap
Caps get swapped. A label on the container keeps its meaning when a lid ends up on the wrong jar, which happens in every kit eventually.
And on the top as well
Because a kit is stored upright in a pouch and read from above. Two labels per container, body and lid, is the version that actually works.
Clear containers do half the work
114 clear containers on this shelf. Seeing that something is a dark powder rather than a pale one narrows it before the label is read.
Use a label that survives water
A kit gets wet. A paper label peels off a PET jar in a day of rain, and an unreadable label is worse than none because it looks like information.
Date the perishables
Supplements, electrolytes and anything oil-based. A date tells the next person whether to trust it, and the next person is often the same person a year later.
And keep a list in the pouch
One card naming what is in each position. It is the redundancy that makes the whole kit legible to somebody who did not pack it, which is the actual failure case.