Storage Bin & Organization Labels

Type a list, get a matching set

One label per line. That is the whole interface, and it is what makes a set of twenty labels a two-minute job rather than an afternoon in a design app.

Add a pipe character and the line splits: TOYS | cars and figures prints TOYS large and bold with the contents underneath in smaller type. Use it where the title alone is ambiguous, which is more often than you would think. ART SUPPLIES tells a seven-year-old nothing; ART SUPPLIES with pens, paper, glue underneath tells them exactly where the glue goes back.

More labels than fit a page simply flow onto the next one.

Three sizes, and they are not interchangeable

• Large, three to a page. Toy bins and laundry baskets, garage tubs, anything at all that has to be readable from the doorway rather than from arm's length.
• Medium, eight to a page. The all-rounder, for shelf boxes and drawers and cabinet baskets.
• Small, eighteen to a page. Spice tins and small parts bins.

Size by the container rather than by how many you need. A small label on a large tub reads as an afterthought, and a large one on a spice jar wraps round the side.

Titles auto-shrink to fit their label width, so a long word like ORGANISATION stays on one line instead of running off the edge.

The coloured band, and when to turn it off

On by default, and it puts a tinted strip behind the title. It gives the eye something to lock onto at shelf height, which is exactly what you want on a wall of identical bins.

Off gives a clean all-white label, which is what you want when the labels are going on something that already has a colour scheme, or when they are being printed in quantity and the tint is costing ink. Alignment is centred by default and can go left, which reads better on a long shelf where labels sit in a row.

A playroom in fifteen minutes

Six lines typed: TOYS, then LEGO with building bricks after the pipe, then BOOKS, then ART SUPPLIES with pens, paper, glue, then GAMES, then CRAFTS. Medium size, band on, cut guides on.

Printed on light card, cut along the dashed lines, taped to the front of each bin. The point is not that the room looks tidier. It is that a child can now put things away without asking where anything goes, which is the difference between a system that lasts a week and one that lasts a year.

Making them last

• Light card rather than paper, because a paper label curls off the front of a bin inside a month and then falls behind it.
• Full-sheet adhesive label paper if you want peel-and-stick, cut along the same guides.
• Clear tape over the top, or a laminating pouch, for anything going near a kitchen or a bathroom.
• Print at full scale. Fit-to-page shifts the guides.
• A craft knife against a metal ruler beats scissors on eighteen small labels.